Whatsapp messenger app experienced outages across the world, with users reporting difficulties in Europe, the US, Asia, the Middle East and other areas for about an hour on Sunday.
According to Down Detector, a large number of users of the popular messaging app reported outages in New York, Brazil, Mumbai and London. Users were having trouble connecting to the app and sending messages.
“WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved", a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.
Many took to social media to air their frustrations with the Facebook-owned app, particularly as it is New Year’s Eve. In India, where the company has 200 million of its billion-plus users, the app went down just after midnight into the new year.
In February 2016, Whatasapp announced its app would no longer work on some phone’s operating systems in the future. The blog post outlined a number of dates from which certain phones would no longer be able to support the app. BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8.0 and older were listed as not being able to use Whatsapp after December 31, 2017. It isn’t clear whether some of the reports of the app being down are due to this issue.