Revellers in India bring down WhatsApp in New Year

While many people in India were ringing the new year and celebrating the end of another year, a massive global outage hit WhatsApp. The popular messaging application collapsed and people around the world could not send messages.

The app stopped working for around 1 hour from 12 midnight to 1AM (Indian Standard Time), but services are now up and functioning normally.

With millions of users, India is one of the key markets for Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Also the number of users is increasing. According to commentators, the reason behind the outage was possibly the heavy usage of the app to send New Year greetings to family and friends.

Users could send messages, but they were not being delivered to the recipient, even though the internet connections of both the sender and the receiver worked normally.

But soon after, angry users who were unable to send New Year greetings to their friends took to Twitter to talk about WhatsApp's disruption of service. Many users received notifications like - "Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience."

The disruption also hit WhatsApp services in other parts of the world on New Year's Eve. Down Detector, reported that WhatsApp was down in the UK with users experiencing connection issues, problems with receiving messages and logging-in. Connection issues were the most commonly issues reported with the app.

According to Down Detector, over 54 per cent of users reported connection problems, while 27 per cent of the complaints were around receiving messages and 17 per cent of the issues reported were around log-in.

According to commentators, WhatsApp has suffered multiple outages in 2017, and the latest comes at the beginning of 2018.