Topics: WhatsApp, Technology, World News
Messaging service WhatsApp is currently down for thousands of users.
According to Downdetector, there have been 2,079 reports of outages since around 7.50am this morning (25 October), a stark contrast from the baseline of three.
Plenty of people have flocked to social media to check they weren't the only ones experiencing issues and to keep others informed.
One user said they turned their Airplane mode 'on and off for 10 minutes' before realising it wasn't just their phone that was playing up.
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Another said they're 'waiting for their WhatsApp messages to blow up' when the app does finally sort itself out.
Over on Twitter, one person wrote: "WhatsApp is down again? Why I’m not surprised lmao."
Another said, "WhatsApp server down in India," showing the crash is affecting people across the globe.
As for how it's impacting people's service, reports state that users are having issues with sending and receiving texts on the app.
There's no news on when the problem will be resolved or what caused it, although some have speculated whether it's related to a recent update on the messaging service.
Earlier this month, the app was said to be testing group sizes of up to 1,024 participants, following on from its previous increase to 512 in June.
As revealed by WABetaInfo, the Meta-owned platform is developing a new feature that will automatically mute group messages when there are more than 512 people involved in order to reduce an influx of notifications.
But this is still in the development phase, meaning the link between the updates and the current outage is just speculative at the time of writing.
The messaging app has also been busily working behind the scenes to ensure users are afforded as much security as possible when they communicate.
A new security campaign has been teased for months, and the head of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, finally unveiled it last week.
"We’re expanding the marketing campaign we started back in January to tell people in the US about the importance of end-to-end encryption," he said.
"5.5 billion SMS messages are still sent daily in the US but SMS messages aren’t secure."
As part of the beefed up security, soon users will have the ability to leave groups silently, hide their online status from certain people, or hide it from absolutely everyone.
A WhatsApp statement said: "For the moments you want to keep your online presence private, we’re introducing the ability to select who can and can’t see when you’re online."
UNILAD has contacted WhatsApp for comment.
