WhatsApp, which has about two billion users worldwide, saw users unable to send and receive texts and videos.


Users across Asia, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom reporting issues with sending and receiving messages [File:Reuters]

Meta Platforms said it has fixed an issue with its messaging service, WhatsApp, after users across Europe, Asia, and the United Kingdom were not able to use the application for hours.

At around 0750 GMT on Tuesday, outage reporting site Downdetector showed over 68,000 users reporting problems with the app in the United Kingdom. Problems were reported by 19,000 people in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa, as well.

"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms said.

The company did not disclose the reason for the outage.

WhatsApp has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses. When WhatsApp had an hours-long outage last October, it hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to oil, before traders switched to alternative platforms such as Telegram.

WhatsApp's latest outage came during the festive season in India - its biggest market by user count - when people use the platform even more than usual to send season's greetings.

Shares of WhatsApp-parent Meta Platforms fell 0.7 percent to $128.85 in premarket trading following the outage.

The company had not sent any fresh updates as users in Asia, India and the United Kingdom started seeing some connections come back online.

#Whatsappdown was trending on Twitter, with more than 142000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet.

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