Just after 2.00pm Hong Kong time, 1,788 reports of connection breakdown were made by users around the world, ranging from Hong Kong and the Philippines in Asia to Pakistan and Dubai in the Middle East, to Brussels in Europe and Canada in North America, according to Down Detector, an independent website that records outages of various online and mobile services.
Another website monitoring service failures, Outage.report, recorded some 700 user outage reports, 46 per cent of them from users who said “everything is down” on their WhatsApp.
Users were unable to send or receive messages on the mobile platform. Their online status was not displayed.
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Down Detector recorded 73 incidents of reported failure of WhatsApp so far in 2018, including the breakdown on Thursday afternoon, the second outage in June.Many users turned to Twitter to check if WhatsApp was really down and if they were the only ones affected.
“When you turn to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is down,” wrote user rita rizk. “Do not panic. WhatsApp is down. You’ll cope,” another user, called the other sarah marshall, tweeted.
Launched in 2009, the Facebook-owned messaging tool had about 1.5 billion monthly active users around the world by the end of 2017.
Facebook and WhatsApp did not reply to requests for comment.
This article WhatsApp goes down in Hong Kong and around the world, according to reports first appeared on South China Morning Post
