WhatsApp experienced worldwide outage because of major updates

The world’s most beloved text messaging application WhatsApp was down on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 for a few hours, making it impossible for use worldwide.

In a statement to Reuters, officials from the company declared: ”Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access it for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologize for the inconvenience.”

The service of WhatsApp went down in parts of the US, Canada, India, Brazil, and Europe, affecting users on Google Android devices, as well as those on iOS and Microsoft mobile operating systems.

Currently, the app is being used by around 1.2 billion people from all around the world, and represents a key tool for communication and commerce for a lot of users. It is especially popular and a convenient way of exchanging text messages and calls between different countries because it’s free and easy to use.

With 1.2 billion users worldwide, WhatsApp is one of the top rated messaging apps. (Source)

It is speculated that this outage came because WhatsApp is currently working on a major update that will soon be available to all its users. The company is said to be testing a new feature that will enable people to pin conversations at the top of the menu inside the app.

A lot of the app users expressed their frustration on Twitter, commenting that these kinds of outages are happening more and more recently.

There was also another major blackout of WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve, with users worldwide reporting downtime.

The social media giant Facebook bought WhatsApp back in 2014 for $19 billion.