WhatsApp Outage: Meta submits report to IT Ministry following 'technical error'

Following the WhatsApp outage, Twitter was flooded with memes as people rushed to the micro-blogging site to check whether WhatsApp was down for all.

WhatsApp was down for over two hours on Tuesday as users across the globe reported outages and were unable to send or receive messages. Following the outage, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had sought a report from Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. The Meta submitted it report to the IT ministry on the service outage yesterday. The IT Ministry had asked the Meta-owned messaging platform to share reasons for the service disruption.

Though the details of the report were not made public, WhatsApp had earlier said that a 'technical error' caused the outage. "The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved," a Meta spokesperson had said.

According to Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, the messaging app was not working for many users across multiple regions on Tuesday afternoon. At one point during the outage on Tuesday, over 29,000 reports were flagged by users on Downdetector. According to Downdetector's heatmap, Indian cities that faced WhatsApp outages included Delhi, Noida, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata.

Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi, however, took a dig at the Centre after the IT ministry sought a report on the outage. "Didn’t know WhatsApp is part of an essential service or a welfare scheme provided/paid for by GoI. Or maybe they are miffed because it disrupted the spread of misinformation? Seeking a report for the outage, quite a joke!" Chaturvedi had said.

Didn’t know WhatsApp is part of an essential service or a welfare scheme provided paid for by GoI. Or maybe they are miffed because it disrupted the spread of misinformation?
Seeking a report for outage, quite a joke https://t.co/kIpKhNEZnx

— Priyanka Chaturved (@priyankac19) October 27, 2022

Following the WhatsApp outage, Twitter was flooded with memes as people rushed to the micro-blogging site to check whether WhatsApp was down for all. 

(With PTI inputs)