While users were busy sending happy new year greetings and making new year resolutions, WhatsApp suffered a massive global outage again. At the stroke of midnight, the popular messaging application stopped working for a lot of people globally including India and parts of UAE. A lot of people in the affected regions weren't able to send messaged and new year greetings to their friends are family. The situation was resolved later but the global outage of WhatsApp created a lot of chaos around the world. The app stopped working at around 12 AM for around an hour till 1 AM which is the prime time for sending new year greetings.
India is one of the prime locations for Facebook-owned WhatsApp. With millions of people using it and the number is still on the rise. The reason behind the crash is expected to be all the users sending and receiving new year greetings which overloaded the application's servers. Some of the users were able to send messages with Single grey tick appearing and internet connection of the receiver working perfectly. Many other users complained not to be able to even send messages which a clock showing, which means message not sent.
Soon after the inconvenience of not being able to send new year greetings to friends and family, hashtags like #WhatsAppisdown, #WhatsAppstoppedworking started trending on Twitter. Users started posting angry statuses and funny memes for the servers being down hoping that the company resolves the issue as soon as possible.
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According to reports, the server was going up and down with the company officials trying to boot it back up and the load shutting it back down. After an hour of struggle by the company officials, it was reported to be working back again at around 1 AM.
A spokesperson from the company told Digital Trends, "WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Meanwhile, WABetaInfo a website with quite accurate information regarding the application had this say -- "WhatsApp is currently working now, and the team confirmed the server issue has been fixed. Note that it is possible that some outages may happen again in the next few hours, also if the worst is over." Although, there's no official statement if it may experience service outage again or not.
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Nowadays, these outrages on WhatsApp have been very common. Earlier it used to be once a year maybe during New Year, that to not globally. In the last 6 months, reports of the application crashing have come up quite often, around 3 to 4 times to be specific. One of the regions behind the outrage of WhatsApp is rumoured to be the death of SMS. This increased the load on the application as people shifted from SMS to WhatsApp. Earlier, SMS shared the load of new year greetings with messaging services like WhatsApp but now it's all up to these applications.
