|
Users in countries ranging from Brazil and Russia to Vietnam and
Myanmar reported on social media that WhatsApp was down in their
countries. The extent of the outage and the reasons for it were
not immediately known.
'Whatsappdown' was the top trending item on Twitter in India,
which is WhatsApp's biggest market with about 200 million of its
billion-plus users. It was also a top trending item on Twitter
in Pakistan, Britain, Germany and many other countries.
Users reported WhatsApp, the world's most popular messaging
service, had begun to gradually function again about 30 minutes
after initial complaints of an outage appeared on social media.
Users in Malaysia and Singapore also complained of WhatsApp
being down in those countries.
A spokeswoman for Facebook in Singapore said the company was
still investigating the matter.
Independent websites monitoring outages of popular social media
services via online conversations and Twitter messages report
regular outages for WhatsApp, often one every few weeks, but
these are typically brief and confined to certain geographies.
WhatsApp has faced similar widespread outages this year,
including for several hours in May.
WhatsApp is used by more than 1.2 billion people around the
world and is a key tool for communications and commerce in many
countries. The service was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19
billion.
(Writing by Euan Rocha and Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by
Christopher Cushing)
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
