WhatsApp Down

WhatsApp users across the world reported that they were unable to send and receive messages on Tuesday morning, suggesting the popular chat platform was suffering a major outage.

The WhatsApp Downdetector page showed a surge in user reports from around 09:00 CAT.

A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company was aware that “some people” were having trouble sending messages and that it was working to restore the service for everyone as quickly as possible. Users were unable to send or receive messages using the WhatsApp Android, iOS, or desktop apps.

Attempting to do so would only show the loading clock icon next to the message, indicating it had not finished sending. On the desktop app, one staff member was getting a “Connecting to WhatsApp” error, as shown below.

Selecting the “Retry Now” button did not resolve the issue. Others received a notification from WhatsApp that he might have unread messages, but did not see any when opening the app.

At 10:00hrs CAT on Tuesday, Meta Platforms updated its WhatsApp Business API status page to acknowledge the disruption.

“We are aware of major disruptions impacting the ability to send messages via the WhatsApp Business Platform. Our teams are working to mitigate the issue. The outage is affecting WhatsApp’s cloud API and on-premises solution.”

Many Zimbabweans turned to other social media platforms like Signal and Telegram in order to communicate.