WhatsApp down: Messaging app faced around 6 hour long outage in October 2021

WhatsApp users are not able to send or receive messages, calls, status or use any of its services across the globe. The Meta-owned messaging platform is facing a global outage and its millions of users are rushing on to other platforms such as Signal and Telegram for the meantime. Although the outage may come as a surprise to many, it is worth noting that this is not the first time that WhatsApp is facing a massive outage all over the globe. To recall, last October Facebook and its subsidiaries, including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary, and Oculus, faced a global outage and were unavailable for around six hours.

Due to the outage, the users were not even able to access the "Log in with Facebook" option in the third-party sites. The infamous outage of Facebook services was caused by the loss of IP routes to the Facebook Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which were all self-hosted at the time. Services gradually restored to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp over the following hour, with service generally restored for users by after almost 7 hours.

The reason for WhatsApp outage today is not yet known, however in an official statement Meta has said that “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,".

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform across the globe and the features that it offers make it a reliable day-to-day conversation app. Outage of such a big network is a rare occurrence and netizens are linking it to numerous theories. Few suggest that this may be due to the solar eclipse while other believe that the company is adding new features to the platform.