10;30PM UPDATE: After almost an hour, WhatsApp appears to be back online with reports of problems now slowing. The firm says it was working on a fix which now appears to solved the issues.
ORIGINAL STORY: If you’re trying and failing to send a message and chat on WhatsApp this evening you are definitely not alone. The hugely popular service, which boasts over 2 billion users worldwide, has been hit by some serious gremlins which have left thousands of fans offline and unable to connect with family and friends. The problems appear to have begun at around 9.30pm BST tonight and there are still plenty of people who can’t use the service with many complaining that their accounts are offline.
It’s currently unclear what is causing the outage but Down Detector, which monitors web issues across the globe, is showing some 40,000 reports which means this is a major problem for the Meta-owned firm. To make matters worse it appears that users across Europe are suffering from the outage which means it’s not localised to one specific region.
Along with reports flooding in on Down Detector, users have also flocked to social media platforms to vent their frustration at the outage.
Speaking on Twitter, one WhatsApp fan named Sarah said: “Jumped to the conclusion that I’d been blocked on WhatsApp before finding out it was down for everyone.”
Whilst another named Jamal simply tweeted: “Is WhatsApp down?”
WhatsApp has just posted a message on Twitter which confirms the outage with the chat app saying: “You may be experiencing some issues using WhatsApp at the moment. We’re aware and working to get things running smoothly again. We’ll keep you updated and in the meantime, thanks for your patience.”
There’s no word on how long things will be down or when the WhatsApp team will have things back up and running but we will bring you full updates once we hear more.
Along with this outage, WhatsApp users are being warned of a new text scam that could leave personal details in the hands of hackers.
As spotted by the ever-reliable team at WABetainfo, the message looks like it’s arrived from the WhatsApp Support account but it’s actually sent by scammers trying to steal user names, passwords and even bank account details. It’s also been reported that some users are asked for the six-digit verification code sent by WhatsApp to access the account on a new device.
You can find out more details about this scam here
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