14 DAY TRIAL // Instant mobile messaging app WhatsApp is down right now in several regions, with users unable to send or receive messages regardless of the mobile platform or the device they are using.
WhatsApp is yet to acknowledge the outage and nothing has been shared on how long it would take to restore the service, but we’re seeing reports from part of Europe and India, with the United States not affected at this point.
DownDetector indicates that a WhatsApp outage is indeed being experienced in Germany, the UK, part of Italy, Spain, and other European countries. Malaysia also appears to be affected, and so is part of China, Russia, Australia, and Turkey.
At the time of publishing this article, the official Twitter account of WhatsApp hasn’t provided any details on the downtime, though the hashtag #WhatsAppDown is getting tens of new tweets every second, which confirms there’s indeed a problem in several regions.
Similar issues also experienced in October
October was a month full of similar issues for WhatsApp, with DownDetector pointing to three different outages that happened the last month. The last one took place on October 16 when the service went down and back up several times during the day, with users in the majority of regions across the world reporting problems with sending and receiving messages.
We have reached out to WhatsApp to find out more on the cause of the outage and will update the article should an answer be provided. Most likely, WhatsApp itself will acknowledge the problem in a tweet later today or announce the service is back up when problems are fixed. Very little is typically being shared on what goes wrong with the messaging service and why it goes down.
At this point, a cyberattack, such as DDoS, cannot be ruled out, but there’s a chance this isn’t the case, though we’re still expecting WhatsApp to share more information on this.
UPDATE: The service is being restored in parts of Europe and some countries are already reporting fully working service, including Romania, Germany, France, and Italy.