WhatsApp outage hits users worldwide, with many reporting issues with sending and receiving messages

SINGAPORE — WhatsApp users around the world appeared to be having issues with the messaging application on Tuesday (Oct 25), with many reporting problems when sending and receiving messages.

Downdetector, a website that monitors real-time problem and outage monitoring, said on its Twitter account that WhatsApp users have been reporting problems with the messaging app since after 3pm Singapore time.

The outage affected users across Asia, Britain, India and South Africa who had issues with sending and receiving texts and videos, news agency Reuters reported.

In Singapore, many users took to social media to say that they were not able to send or receive text messages.

Twitter user Dean Ahmad, who tweets using the handle @mindsetframer, wrote on the social media platform that users in Singapore were experiencing the outage as well.

“Yes. I can confirm that #whatsapp is down in #Singapore as well,” he wrote.

Another user, who goes by the handle @garamserenes, asked online whether the issue was only in Singapore. “Help, my WhatsApp is not working. Is it only in Singapore?”

The outage also trended on Twitter, with close to 700,000 tweets posted about the problem as of 4.30pm. 

Later in the day, Reuters reported that the messaging app was slowly coming back online by 5pm Singapore time, with some users saying that they were able to send and receive some messages, as well as videos.

WhatsApp parent company Meta told Reuters earlier: "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." 

This is the first major outage involving WhatsApp since October last year, when the service went down for nearly six hours before the problem was resolved.

Meta, which was known as Facebook at the time, said then that the major outage was due to a “configuration changes to its routers”.