WhatsApp Went Down Globally This Morning For An Hour, And People Lost Their Minds

It wasn't just you, WhatsApp was down for about an hour this morning. The outage impacted global usage of the app, which boasts over 1.2 billion active users. The app is a primary means of messaging between friends and family, and those people were not happy with the outage. The outage was first noticed when the term "whatsappdown" was trending in countries like India.

The app has a particularly large user base in developing nations like India, which is also its biggest market with 200 million users. India isn’t the only country where the downtime for the app was trending, it was also trending on social media in Pakistan, Britain, Germany, Brazil, Russia, Vietnam, and Myanmar according to reports.

WhatsApp has released an official statement concerning the outage, now that the outage has been fixed. "Earlier today, WhatsApp users globally had trouble accessing the app for about an hour. This issue has been fixed and we apologize for the inconvenience," a spokesperson said.

2 mins silence for those who were constantly turning their mobile data "on and off"#WhatsAppDown #whatsapp pic.twitter.com/rsUgrnMNgW

— manpinder bajwa (@manpindr) November 3, 2017

Naturally, there were no details offered on what exactly caused the outage officially. However, speculation is that the outage was caused by a bug in the code for the app. WhatsApp has been down before, and this is the second time that the outage was global in scale. Typically, the outages WhatsApp experiences on occasion are only regional. Whatever the cause, WhatsApp was fast to repair it with some regions back online within half an hour of the first reports of downtime coming in.

WhatsApp has had its share of controversy over the years; the EU Commission hit parent company Facebook with a $122 million fine over account sharing between the two services. There have also been allegations that WhatsApp left a backdoor in place so that the government could snoop on messages -- WhatsApp has flatly denied those claims.