Your trusted source

WhatsApp, the messaging platform, was starting to come back online and the company said the issue has been fixed after users across the world reported problems earlier on Tuesday, the Guardian reports.

At about 07.50 GMT, the outage reporting site Downdetector had shown more than 68,000 users in the UK had reported problems with the app. Issues were also reported by 19,000 users in Singapore and 15,000 in South Africa.

“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company, Meta Platforms, said.

The company did not disclose the reason for the outage. While the app was down, less serious problems hit other services across the net, including sister platforms Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

WhatsApp has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses. When WhatsApp had an hours-long outage last October, it hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to oil, before traders switched to alternative platforms such as Telegram.

“This highlights the significance of vast hosting companies directing data around the internet along with companies and individuals relying on single points of communication,” said Jack Moore, an adviser at the Slovakia-based cybersecurity firm ESET.

“Multiple areas will inevitably be significantly impacted as a result of this downtime, along with a predicted financial hit but lessons from other recent prominent times when the internet has gone down will have hopefully taught many to have access to other forms of communication,” he said.