WhatsApp is down in a major outage

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

WhatsApp is down in a major outage affecting the communications app. The service started experiencing issues at around 3AM ET, with users greeted with a “connecting” message. If you’re attempting to use WhatsApp web, you’ll see a “Make sure your computer has an active internet connection” error. Downdetector has more than 60,000 reports of issues with the service, and the outage appears to be affecting users globally.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” says Meta spokesperson Joshua Breckman in a statement to The Verge.

This is the first major WhatsApp outage since the service went down as part of a massive outage that also took down Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and Facebook last year. That outage took nearly six hours before it was resolved and WhatsApp was back online. Meta, known as Facebook at the time, said that major outage was due to a configuration change to its routers. Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook are all functioning fine right now — it’s only WhatsApp that’s down.

WhatsApp outages are still relatively rare, but they have major implications for communications worldwide as the service is used by more than two billion people each month. When WhatsApp went down last year, Brazilian workers’ jobs went with it.

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