Across the UK users woke to find that the WhatsApp chat app was down, but the problem has also been noted by users in other parts of the world. The service now appears to be in recovery.
The outage began before 8am in the UK, with independent site, DownDetector, noticing an international problem with the service . The site said that 60 per cent of customers were experiencing connection issues.
The outage has also been noted in other parts of the world, indicating that the outage has had a global reach. Singapore, India, and Mozambique are other countries where consistent problems were being detected.
A screenshot from the DownDetector WhatsApp Outage Map.
When trying to access the app it appeared to be unable to connect, despite there being a suitable internet connection. This inconvenience has sparked a widespread social media reaction from confused and disgruntled users.
Guillaume Ayme, IT Operations evangelist, Splunk, said: “Both consumers and businesses have become dependent on digital services such as WhatsApp, and the disruption caused by an outage like today’s can have a significant impact on a brand’s reputation in minutes.
“Yet the warning signs of an upcoming outage are often available but difficult for teams to spot in the vast amount of data being generated by IT infrastructure. Organisations have to utilise advancements in AI in order to predict potential issues and to provide automated remediation to avoid disruption.
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“Today’s digital services also increasingly use a number of 3rd party components in order to accelerate their time to market. The fault of issues can often lie with these external partners or in a number of problems across multiple combinations. It’s therefore essential for organisations to ensure they have visibility across all these technology areas and have the means of getting to the root cause of issues through machine learning before they impact users.”
WhatsApp users are not unfamiliar with outages, with the chat app also going down in May 2017. This instance resulted in a global outage that caused some customers to be unable to use the service for several hours.
Not only are outages of this kind extremely inconvenient for users, but they can be extremely costly for businesses. Veeam’s Availability Report presented findings that unplanned outages hit UK businesses with costs of £17.9 million per year.
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The organisations that provide these services also face significant reputational damage, and this outage has not come at a good time for WhatsApp, considering that the company has recently announced a business app.
This new business app aims to enhance the communication between businesses and customers, with a focus on both large and small businesses across a full range of industries. The new app is set to allow orders to be placed and enquiries to be made. Potential users of such a service may be put off by the prospect of an outage hindering their business progress.
