On Tuesday, WhatsApp was down for more than two hours, with users all across the world reporting outages and being unable to send or receive messages. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has asked Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, for a report following the outage. Yesterday, the Meta presented its report on the service interruption to the IT minister. The messaging service owned by Meta was contacted by the IT Ministry to provide an explanation for the service interruption.
WhatsApp had already stated that a “technical error” was the reason for the outage, even if the specifics of the report were not made public. A Meta representative stated, “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved.”
The messaging service was down for many users in numerous regions on Tuesday afternoon, according to Downdetector, which records outage complaints. During the Tuesday outage, members of Downdetector flagged over 29,000 reports at one point. Delhi, Noida, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Kolkata were among the Indian cities that experienced WhatsApp outages, according to Downdetector’s heatmap.
Priyanka Chaturvedi, a Shiv Sena MP, criticised the Centre when the IT ministry requested a report on the disruption. “Didn’t know WhatsApp is part of an essential service or a welfare scheme provided/paid for by GoI. Or maybe they are miffed because it disrupted the spread of misinformation? Seeking a report for the outage, quite a joke!” As said by Chaturvedi. Memes flooded Twitter after the WhatsApp outage as users flocked to the microblogging platform to see if WhatsApp was down for everyone.
