WhatsApp was down for 30 minutes across the globe

 

Millions of people across the globe experienced problems connecting to the widely used instant messaging chat app, WhatsApp, for 30 minutes on Friday 3.

In Kenya, WhatsApp has become a popular communication channel. Kenyans went on Facebook to check with friends if they were able to access the application. 

It is not clear what caused the outage in the Facebook-owned app. According to DownDetector, WhatsApp went off in Europe, parts of India, Singapore, Vietnam, Iraq, and Mozambique. 

Not the first time WhatsApp has gone off

Sending or receiving messages using the App was impossible during that duration. This is not the first outage that WhatsApp has suffered in 2017. The hugely-popular Facebook-owned chat app went offline for thousands of users back in May 2017. The outage lasted hours, and WhatsApp personnel were forced to issue a statement about the disruption to the service.

WhatsApp has steadily added a number of new features over the last year, including support for GIFs, FaceTime-style video calls and the 'Delete for Everyone' feature which allows users to recall messages sent on individual chats as well as group chats.

On October 30, WhatsApp launched a new feature option to delete potentially embarrassing messages after they've sent them. The new option allows a user to "delete messages for everyone" in a chat within seven minutes of sending it - so you've got to be quick if you have a change of heart. WhatsApp has been testing the feature for some time and is now rolling it out to its user base of one billion people