WhatsApp provides an explanation for why its service was unavailable for two hours to millions of users

On October 25, WhatsApp experienced a significant outage in India and other nations. For nearly two hours, millions of people were unable to access the app and online clients.

Users were unable to exchange messages or use services like WhatsApp audio and video calls because of the outage. The Meta-owned company has since provided an explanation for why its services were unavailable everywhere, albeit in a cryptic way.

A firm representative told India Today Tech that “the brief outage was the consequence of a technical fault on our part.” The business also stated that the problem has been fixed.

Its parent firm, Meta, did not provide any information, and it is still unknown what led to the “technical mistake.” Unrelatedly, WhatsApp lost millions of subscribers in October for the first time in six years. At the time, the business claimed that a DNS (Domain Name System)-related issue was to blame for the outage of its services. Even Meta published a blog in which it stated, “Our engineering teams have discovered that faults that prevented this connection were brought on by configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres. Our services were interrupted as a result of the network traffic disturbance, which had a cascading effect on how our data centres communicate.

Though more information from the organisation is expected, the current outage might be caused by a comparable problem.

On October 25, there appeared to be an outage at 12:30 IST, and by 2:30 IST, services had apparently resumed. Users of WhatsApp were unable to send and receive messages or media files for almost two hours. Both phone conversations and video calls were also unavailable to users.

Message transmission problems affected 69% of users, while server connectivity issues affected 21% of users, according to the outage tracker Downdetector. For unknown reasons, 9% of users were unable to use the app.

However, WhatsApp’s siblings, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, all of which fall under the Meta-umbrella, were functioning normally both in India and elsewhere.