WhatsApp is back online after a two-hour outage

It seems to be that time of the year when a major global tech platform goes offline for many people around the world. So, if you’ve tried using WhatsApp you might have been greeted with the “connecting” message. Don’t worry it wasn’t just you. For almost two hours, WhatsApp services were down for a lot of users. As per Downdetector there have been more than 70,000 reports of WhatsApp service outages.

It appeared to be a global problem and Meta has officially acknowledged the issue. “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,” says the company in a statement to The Verge.

Last year, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus all went down for almost six hours in a massive global outage. At the time, the company stated that the issue was due to a faulty configuration update. But the problem was big enough that Cloudflare had to deploy additional resources just to keep up with the traffic surge caused by the outage.

Thankfully, only WhatsApp faced issues this time around and the service appears to be back online for many users right now.

[Update GMT + 5.30]: WhatsApp is now back online. The story has been updated accordingly