WhatsApp not working because on restart

About two hours of absolute darkness, then WhatsApp slowly got back to work. On the morning of October 25, there was an instant messaging service shutdown that hadn’t happened for some time.

From about 8:30 this morning, reports of those who could not use the messaging system owned by Meta (Facebook) multiplied. A “bottom” whose dimensions, whether local or global, are not yet entirely clear. However, the Downdetector.com site which monitors inefficiencies has seen reports of malfunctions multiply. Also because Whatsapp has logged out in the desktop version as well. And it worked for an uneven half morning. The other Meta services – such as Facebook and Instagram – did not suffer from particular problems and continue to function correctly.

“We are aware that some people find it difficult to send messages. We are working to restore WhatsApp as soon as possible,” a WhatsApp spokesperson tried to reassure. Among the reports of Downdetector.com site disruptions are the inability to send messages to groups and individual chats. But also the non-appearance of the double control of reception of messages. Some users have tried uninstalling the app and reinstalling it, but failed to fix the problem.

WhatsApp, the previous ones

The last WhatsApp disruptions of the magnitude of today October 25 were about a year ago on October 4, 2021. On that day, there was an outage of all applications in the Meta group. Including Instagram and Facebook, for 6 long hours. On this occasion, after the services were restored, the official apology from founder Mark Zuckerberg had also arrived. On this occasion, as Roberta Gerboni recalled on VelvetMag, it was the worst interruption of the WhastApp service since 2008.

Photo Ansa / Epa Andrej Cukic

Even before Facebook’s, an apology immediately came from the social media giant that controls WhatsApp, with a post on social rival Twitter from Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer. “Sincere apologies to everyone affected by the Facebook powered outages at this time. We are experiencing network issues and teams are working as quickly as possible to debug and restore as soon as possible.”

The one on October 4, 2021 was a catastrophic outage believed to have been caused by a server update gone wrong. This was explained by Facebook Vice President of Infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan. In fact, it didn’t crash, but WhatsApp suddenly stopped working on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, both in Europe and North America. A blackout that forced millions of users to use Twitter and Telegram to stay connected with the world. This time it went better. But it is clear that this kind of incident is very likely to happen again: it is only a matter of time.

Photo Ansa / Epa Shahzaib Akber