WhatsApp mysteriously goes dark for several hours

whatsapp
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Files

REUTERS – WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, suffered a widespread global outage on Wednesday that lasted for several hours before being resolved, the company said.

“Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologize for the inconvenience,” WhatsApp said in an email late Wednesday afternoon.

The OTT messaging service was down in parts of India, Canada, the United States and Brazil, according to Reuters journalists. It affected people who use the service on Apple’s iOS operating system, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows mobile OS.

In Brazil, where the professional class relies heavily on the messaging service, WhatsApp was down for about two and a half hours. Many users switched to rival system Telegram, which has picked up millions of customers in Brazil after two previous WhatsApp outages resulting from court orders.

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.

(Reporting by Sangameswaran S and Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by David Ingram and Jonathan Weber in San Francisco and Anthony Broadle in Brasilia; Editing by Richard Chang and Leslie Adler)

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