WhatsApp Hit By Outage, Users Unable To Send Messages

SUMMARY

By 8:16 PM, the outage peaked as many as 2,815 users reported issues with the messaging app WhatsApp on DownDetector

Meta’s dashboard for business products said that WhatsApp Business API did face “low disruptions” on April 12, which impacted sending of messages for users

Earlier in the day, digital payments infrastructure UPI, too, was hit by a massive outage

Messaging platform WhatsApp faced a massive outage today which left users from India and other countries unable to send messages.

As per DownDetector, users started reporting issues with accessing WhatsApp around 4:30 PM but the issue was resolved around 6 PM. However, the platform became unresponsive again around 7 PM. By 8:16 PM, the outage peaked as many as 2,815 users reported issues with the messaging app on the tracking website.

87% of the users reported issues with “sending messages”, while 10% flagged issues with the app itself.

The company has so far not issued any clarification on the matter. However, as per Meta’s dashboard for business products, WhatsApp Business API did face “low disruptions” on April 12, which impacted sending of messages for users of the B2B offering.

However, the social media giant said that a fix was deployed and the issue was mitigated around 8:40 PM IST.

Meanwhile, many users took to social media platform X to raise their concerns over service issues while using the messaging platform. One user cited issues with uploading status, while another flagged “getting a red exclamation mark on sending messages”. Complaints with the messaging app also included chat freezing and glitching on iOS and persistent problems with transferring and restoring backups.

The interruption at WhatsApp came barely hours after the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), too, was hit by a massive outage. While UPI was restored around 3:39 PM, there seems to be no clarity on what caused the outage.

This also comes close on the heels of a global outage at social media platform X in March and at workplace communication platform Slack in February this year.

Notably, this is not the first time that Meta has witnessed technical issues in recent months. In December 2024, Meta-owned social media platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – faced a widespread outage across India.

Prior to that in November and March last year, WhatsApp went down for several users across the country.