Nope, your phone’s not broken – WhatsApp DID just stop working
Planning on sending out a few 'Happy New Year' messages this evening? Well, you might want to consider email or even – gasp – TEXTING, because the oh-so reliable WhatsApp is experiencing some issues today.
Users across Ireland, the UK and most of Europe experienced a total outage of the app around 4.30pm today, which lasted for around 30 minutes.
Unsurprisingly, people took to Twitter in their droves to complain/try to remember how normal texting works:
I never realised I had a dependancy on an app so much until #Whatsapp went down just now. Need to go more #offthegrid
— Ben Millett (@bmillett) December 31, 2015
#Whatsapp down, people losing their minds. Meanwhile on the @nokia 3210… Lad pic.twitter.com/1pgRSC9bxF
— Peter Cox (@petercox5) December 31, 2015
Whatsapp is down and I couldn't figure out how to message people for a minute there then remembered SMS exists
— Owen Williams (@ow) December 31, 2015
It's thought that the outage had to do with the high number of people across the world celebrating New Year's Eve in different timezones – New Zealand was the first to ring in 2016 at 11am Irish time, with Australia following soon after.
With around 900m users around the globe, we'll allow WhatsApp the odd hiccup, but here's hoping it doesn't happen again.
The messaging service isn't the only company to have server issues today – this morning all of the BBC's websites were down, including news sites and the iPlayer. Disaster.
