WhatsApp outage: Meta asked to explain reason behind blackout

A day after Meta-owned social media platform WhatsApp suffered the global outage on October 25, the Centre, while tightening scrutiny over the social media platform, has asked Meta to submit a report regarding this in the next 4-5 days. 

On Tuesday, WhatsApp suffered a global outage for two long hours, owing to which users were unable to share videos, pictures and messages, thus disrupting businesses. 

Govt's letter to Meta

According to reports, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) has asked Meta to submit a report explaining the reason behind the global outage and whether the outage happened due to technical glitch or a cyberattack. The Centre has asked Meta to coordinate with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In), under MeiTY to ascertain that no untoward incident happened because of the outage.

Telecom Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “We have asked WhatsApp for a report, and expect it to come over the next 4-5 days.”

Meta’s response on outage

The WhatsApp outage on Tuesday was the longest this year. On Wednesday, Meta said the global outage occurred due to a technical glitch. However, the big tech company did not explain the type of technical glitch. 

“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue for any inconvenience. The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part,” a Meta spokesperson said. 

Meanwhile, according to a report by Downdetector, the outage was witnessed in Asia, United Kingdom, South Africa and Europe. The outage occurred at 12:30 pm IST (Indian Standard Time) and lasted till 2:30 PM IST. The report showed that while 69% users faced issues with sending messages, 21% users faced server connection-related issues. Owing to the outage, the users were also unable to use WhatsApp web on the desktop. 

However, WhatsApp’s other sister apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Messenger were working without any disruption in India and other regions. 

Notably, this is not the first time that the social media platform has suffered an outage that lasted for hours. On October 5 last year, the social media giant suffered an outage that lasted for more than six hours. Other apps, such as Facebook and Instagram were also down due to the outage.