WhatsApp service outages on New Year’s Eve

Popular chatting platform WhatsApp reportedly experienced service outages across regions in Europe, Asia, and South America on New Year’s Eve. This report was first published by Venture Beat. The report, citing information provided by Down Detector, suggested that major service problems were primarily concentrated in England and Netherlands along with some parts of central Europe. The problems with the app’s service started showing up at around 9 a.m. PT.

According to a report by Digital Trends, a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed that the problems actually began at around 10:30 a.m. PT. “WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience,” the WhatsApp spokesperson was quoted as saying.

On the contrary, the report by Down Detector continued to show that several regions were still affected by service problems. User comments streaming on the website further indicated the confirmation of this news. Some of the users even made mention of a trouble wherein they weren’t able to receive verification codes, even though WhatsApp was suggested to be operational in their region. It is not clear whether these problems will have a widespread impact or whether they were limited in one region only.

This is not the first time that the Facebook-owned chatting platform has experienced this problem. Earlier in May, WhatsApp users based in the United States reported that they were not able to activate the application at all. This has been a universal problem with WhatsApp.

The company takes merely a couple of hours to resolve the problem, however, it ends up causing a lot of inconvenience to users nonetheless. WhatsApp is highly popular in the world and has managed to earn itself a reputation for quality and reliability. Therefore, it does come across as an unpleasant surprise that users have to experience this, especially on New Year’s Eve.