WhatsApp has stopped working amid a mystery outage.
The usually reliable app has stopped sending or receiving messages, according to multiple users.
The website Down Detector reported huge problems in northern Europe, Mexico and Brazil, with some issues elsewhere. But parts of the US didn’t seem to be running into problems.
Others in affected areas appeared to be able to get online fine. There doesn’t appear to be anything special about those people, or any obvious way to get online if the app isn’t working.
The problems usually fix themselves reasonably quickly, with outages not often lasting for more than an hour or so.
The Facebook-owned app tends to be quite reliable, not often suffering major outages. But any problems tend to be large – the app is used by more than one billion people around the world and so any problems can affect hundreds of millions of people.
Some noted that the outage came right in the middle of transfer deadline day. As revealed in an article in The Independent earlier this year, the app is at the centre of the process of buying and selling football players – though of course such deals make up only a tiny number of the people using the app at any one time.
While you’re waiting for the app to come online, you might want to learn some useful WhatsApp tricks that you can put to use once it’s available again.
