META-owned WhatsApp was hit by an outage that prevented many of its billions of users from connecting or sending messages on Tuesday.

The popular messaging service later came back online after remaining inaccessible for almost two hours in many countries across the world, including Pakistan.

Downdetector, an outage reporting site, showed over 100,000 users had reported problems with the app. It tracks outages by collecting status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors, on its platform.

WaBetaInfo, an online platform that tracks updates to WhatsApp, said the outage was caused due to server issues.

US tech giant Meta, which also owns Facebook, later confirmed the global outage and said it was working to restore the service “as quickly as possible”.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” a Meta spokesman told AFP.

The parent company later said it had resolved the WhatsApp outage though it did not confirm the origin. “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” the company’s spokesperson said in a statement.

Immediately after the outage, #whatsappdown became a top Twitter trend, with more than 70,000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet. Millions of messages on the Meta-owned photo-sharing platform Instagram also flagged the outage.

Some Twitter users tried to find a funny side to the technical trouble, joking that Twitter would seek to exploit the situation and gain a flurry of new connections in the coming hours.

The outage occurred almost a year after one of the worst disruptions, which affected almost all of the Meta-owned services.

In October 2021, the services of WhatsApp, Facebook, Oculus, Insta­gram and Messenger went out for almost six hours. The company later blamed “configuration changes” for the outage, which also impacted many of its internal tools and systems.

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2022