WhatsApp today - latest: App not connecting as chats mysteriously go dark in major outage
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Your support makes all the difference.WhatsApp has been hit by a major outage that has forced all chats to go dark.
Users are unable to send or receive messages – which instead just hang, waiting to be delivered.
The company is yet to give any information about the problems, and there is no explanation of why the problem has occurred or when it might be solved.
There also appears to be no easy fix for the problem, with users instead waiting for the company to fix its services before they can begin chatting again.
WhatsApp is the biggest chat platform in the world, with well over two billion users, and is relied upon by a range of people and businesses every day.
WhatsApp is back
After a couple of hours, service has been restored and messages are flooding back onto WhatsApp. Everything seems to be back to normal.
Could outage lead to political stability?
Some of WhatsApp’s more than two billion users are particularly important: the UK’s MPs. The chat app is infamous for being the place where plotting parliamentarians decide on their lines of attack, get together to take down their colleagues, and decide on their new leaders.
But now it is broken. Without WhatsApp, how will MPs plot more political chaos? Or are we about to see a (presumably brief) outbreak of political unity for a while?
WhatsApp trends on Twitter
WhatsApp is, of course, trending on Twitter, as people flock to the site to see if it’s broken for everyone or just them. Most are people making jokes about the chaos, and the fact that everyone is on that site for the same reason – but others are enjoying the relative quiet:
What happens in the outage?
Unlike some previous WhatsApp outages, the app will actually make it seem like you can send a message. You can write it out, press send, and everything will happen as normal until that point.
But the message will never actually be delivered. The little clock that appears will not turn into a tick, as it should. Instead, it will just be left hanging.
Of course, the same will happen to anyone that tries to message you.
So the app will just go dark, as if it is on pause.
Hello and welcome...
... to The Independent’s live coverage of the major WhatsApp outage on 25 October.
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