Flooded with millions of new year wishes, WhatsApp servers crashed last night. This was a global outage and the services were disrupted in India too. In fact, India could be the cause of this outage with its 200 million active users of a billion globally. WhatsApp was soon able to restore its services and the app is now working fine.
WhatsApp couldn’t provide the exact reason for the outage, but the only viable reason can be a sudden surge in the traffic. The service was down for an hour from around 12 AM to 1 AM IST on January 1. People affected by this problem took to other social media websites to express their inability to send new year wishes. Some hashtags like #WhatsAppisdown and #WhatsAppstoppedworking also started trending on Twitter.
People noticed the outage when they were able to send a message on WhatsApp, but it wasn’t getting delivered to the recipients. The sender could only see a single grey tick despite both the sender and receiver having their internet connection active. Some of the users also received a notification from WhatsApp saying “Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
The WhatsApp services could be restored at around 12:40 AM IST but they stopped again. This was also a worldwide issue and the company could restore the services once again only after 1 AM IST. WhatsApp has been working fine after that and all the messages are going through normally.
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With the rapid increase in the active users of WhatsApp, the app crashes have become a common sight since a few months. There have been several instances of the app outages that left users unable to send messages. WhatsApp has over a billion users all over the world and a majority of them are from India, which happens to be an important market for the company.
