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The most popular instant-messaging service on the planet, WhatsApp, faced a temporary outage today in Pakistan as users took to Twitter to express their outrage about the crash.
At around late-afternoon today, the service crashed temporarily, leaving thousands of users unable to send messages to anyone from the app. Users who faced this issue reported that when existing chat was opened, the name of the person or group was replaced with a spinning wheel and the word “connecting”.
Moreover, if the user attempted to change the privacy settings, the service generated another error message that said, “WhatsApp was not able to retrieve current privacy settings. Please try again later.” The outage lasted around half an hour and even less for some. Some users have also reported that it worked fine via a VPN, leading many to suspect government intervention behind the service’s unavailability.
WhatsApp hasn’t officially acknowledged the outage yet, nor has it given an official statement as to why the service faced this issue. Surprisingly, only users in Pakistan were affected and the service appeared to be working fine all across the world.
.@WhatsApp down in #Pakistan only. It’s working through VPN#whatsappdownpic.twitter.com/AKxA4xCisP
— نون لیک | Noon Leak (@TabdeeliKarkun) May 18, 2016
and after being down for over 28 mins, #whatsapp is back in #Pakistan. #whatsappdown
— Anas Mallick (@AnasMallick) May 18, 2016
Is it just in red zone or everyone is having issue with #WhatsApp #whatsappdown
— Syeda Aliya Azhar (@aliyasyed48) May 18, 2016
WhatsApp, with nearly a billion users worldwide, is the first choice as a messaging service for most Pakistanis and also plans to launch an Urdu version to cater to them.
