WhatsApp app
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook’s parent company Yuansuffered a global outage on Tuesday.
According to Downdetector.com, which monitors internet service outages, the problem was first noticed around 3:17 a.m. ET.
Users reported problems sending and receiving messages. Normal service on WhatsApp appeared to resume around 5AM ET.
WhatsApp Web, an internet browser version of the messaging service that previously failed to load, also worked fine when tested by CNBC.
Meta confirms that there was an initial problem with WhatsApp.
“We know some people are currently having issues sending messages, and we’re working to get WhatsApp back for everyone as quickly as possible,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC.
WhatsApp, which has about 2 billion users, is particularly popular in countries such as India and Brazil.
Users around the world, from the UK to India and Turkey, reported outages on Tuesday.
This isn’t the first glitch of the Meta-owned platform this year. In August, Facebook users reported an issue where their feeds were spammed by others who originally posted on celebrity pages.
Other tech companies have also faced technical issues this year. In August, Google’s search engine went down for a while. And in July, Twitter suffered an outage.
