WhatsApp down for thousands of users in India

Update: WhatsApp has confirmed, on 15:20 IST, October 25, that the service is back online. The company did not share the cause of the outage. "We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson said.

WhatsApp, the popular instant communication app owned by Meta, is reportedly facing an outage. WhatsApp users in India are currently unable to send and receive messages.

Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages across the globe, has shown a spike in the number of users reporting WhatsApp’s outage that is affecting both personal chats as well as group chats.

Not just in India, users from across the world have started flooding social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram with posts about being unable to send messages on the app.

Many users have raised issues on Twitter with hashtags like #whatsapp#whatsappdown.

“It currently seems impossible to send a message on WhatsApp groups, but personal chats also seem to be largely affected,” says a Twitter user.

Affected regions based on the website’s map include major cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Lucknow, and some other cities, as analysts believe this could be the case of ‘partial disruption’. While there is no official response or acknowledgement from WhatsApp, there are reports that users are not being able to send or receive messages on the messaging platform. 

"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," a Meta spokesperson said.

Currently, there are over 487 million WhatsApp users in India alone, making it the leading country in terms of WhatsApp audience size. Second-ranked Brazil had 118.5 million WhatsApp messenger users. WhatsApp is one of the most used messaging services worldwide.