WhatsApp Web Is Down, Users Flag Issues While Chatting

WhatsApp appears to be down worldwide, causing users trouble while chatting on a Thursday afternoon. The outage began at around 2:15 pm IST, severely impacting WhatsApp Web, which lets you chat with friends through a PC browser. As many as 225 users reported their WhatsApp accounts began acting up, preventing them from accessing chats, profiles, and even calls.

Downdetector, which tracks global internet service outages, shows a sharp spike in outages, impacting mainly the web version. 44 per cent of the most reported problems are for server connection, implying that WhatsApp’s browser client for chatting is down. 41 per cent of the impacted users said they were facing issues in sending messages, but some user reports cite problems while making calls and accessing the profile. Some users have also reported a connection glitch in chatting with group members, while others said they were unable to post Status updates.

With just 15 per cent of problems, WhatsApp’s mobile apps are the least impacted. Downdetector shows the Android and iOS apps have remained accessible to users globally despite the downtime. Meta or WhatsApp has not acknowledged the outage, meaning the downtime is not severe and could be resolved soon.

While outages are most commonly caused by server downtime, other notable reasons include DNS (Domain Name System) issues, BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) glitches, and configuration changes in backbone routers. A more harmful and challenging cause is a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which bad actors launch to disrupt services by overwhelming servers with excessive traffic.

WhatsApp has previously faced DDoS attacks, including the headline-grabbing incident where Russian users experienced hours-long outages. Meta assures that since the data is end-to-end encrypted, hackers cannot intercept the content of chats or calls. However, privacy advocates have expressed concerns about the lack of a high-security encryption level for data stored on servers.

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