WhatsApp suffers brief outage

SINGAPORE — Shortly after the Republic ushered in the New Year, mobile messaging application WhatsApp suffered an outage.

Network tracking site downdetector.sg received more than a thousand reports of the app's outage as of 1am today (Jan 1).

The outage appeared to last slightly more than half an hour.

The website said WhatsApp had been facing issues since 12.38am. At about 12.45am, the tracking site received 1,739 reports of network outage. By 1.15am, service on WhatsApp seemed to be restored as the tracking site only received two reports of outage.

Some 42 per cent of users on the tracking site reported  problems sending or receiving messages, while another 42 per cent said they had connection problems. Fourteen per cent reported log-in problems.

WhatsApp allows users to send and receive messages, photos, and other information and is widely used among smart phone users as an alternative to SMS.