The instant messaging application WhatsApp experienced some technical difficulties during one of its most important times of the year -- New Year's Eve. The incident was so bad that the app received complaints and inquiries from thousands of users, reporting that they were simply unable to send messages. The downtime lasted for about two hours, rendering numerous users across the globe unable to send their New Year well-wishes.
The areas that were mostly affected by the service outage were across Europe, Asia, and South America. However, most of the cases occurred in England, as well as the Netherlands, which are where most users were simply unable to send their messages, as well as receive incoming ones. The cases were thinly spread in other parts of central Europe. The estimated time that WhatsApp was down was between 8:00 a.m. EST and 10 a.m. EST.
In the United Kingdom, the service was down some time after 6 p.m., and lasted for about two hours. According to reports, downdetector.co.uk received 2012 reports at the time that people were at the point of being extremely frustrated due to the prolonged period of down time.
Some users have even complained that they had to go back to the old ways of creating messages for their New Year's eve greeting -- by way of texting jovial messages or calling people up to personally give out their greetings.
Coincidentally, at this time in the U.K., Asian countries, such as India and Sri Lanka, were already celebrating the New Year, and the outages map of Down Detector also shows that some of these areas are highlighted -- indicating that a significant number of complaints came from these countries as well. It is important to mention that Facebook, which is the company behind WhatsApp, has no dedicated page to inform its users regarding the status of the app.
