WhatsApp Service Restored After Worldwide Outage

WhatsApp has been restored for users in the UK following an outage yesterday evening that left people in many parts of the world unable to send or receive messages.

The issues started taking effect at around 20:00 UK time last night and were fixed just after midnight according to down detector.

It is unclear what caused the problems, but the outage is a blow to WhatsApp and its ambitions of becoming the world’s de facto messaging platform.

Read More: The story of WhatsApp

WhatsApp outage

For many, WhatsApp has replaced SMS as their primary mobile messaging application, and Twitter was awash with complaints. Twitter itself has not communicated the issues using its account.

The application has more than one billion users and was bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014. Facebook has scrapped the annual subscription fee, added voice calls and launched desktop messaging in a bid to increase use and maximise the value of the acquisition.

The social network has promised never to introduce advertising which means it is targeting alternative streams of revenue. It has plans to let businesses contact users directly and also wants WhatsApp to become a platform for business communication with new features like document sharing.

It changed its privacy policy last year to allow businesses to message users, but also so data could be transferred between WhatsApp and its parent company so Facebook could deliver more targeted

This was highly controversial and the practice has been suspended in several countries. In response, Facebook paused the transfer in the UK and across the European Union.

WhatsApp has been contacted for comment.

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