WhatsApp services, including group chats and voice and video calling, appear to be restored in South Africa and beyond.
At around 10:45, WhatsApp came back to life after a total – seeming global – outage of more than an hour. Messages were delivered, and voice and video calling both worked.
Then it went down again, but only briefly. By 11AM, WhatsApp appeared to be stable and fully operational again.
WhatsApp, and its parent company Meta, did not immediately say what had happened. On an status page for business users, Meta said only: “The issue impacting send media messages has been mitigated.”
The service started to behave oddly on Tuesday morning, users across all South African mobile networks reported.
Similar reports came in from Europe and India.
Initially, users were seeing a single tick when attempting to send messages. A little later, users were seeing the clock icon – indicating that messages were still being sent – and no messages appeared to be going through.
Attempting to initiate a voice or video call brought up the “calling” screen, then the message: “Couldn’t place call. Make sure your device has an Internet connection and try again.”
Frustrated users reported restarting WhatsApp, and rebooting their phones, as well as blaming wifi and mobile data connections, before realising the problem was with WhatsApp.
The outage affected both person-to-person and group chats.
WhatsApp did not immediately provide details about the outage.
In October 2021, a little over one year ago, platforms owned by Facebook parent company Meta suffered a global outage, leaving WhatsApp down along with Facebook messenger.
In that instance, WhatsApp confirmed the outage by way of its Twitter account, and Meta also provided information by way of Twitter, much to the delight of that competitor.
Source: BusinessInsider