WhatsApp suffers brief global outage on New Year's Eve, returns to normalcy in 2018

Facebook-owned messaging service application WhatsApp suffered a global outage just before the New Year and returned within an hour.

Even India, which accounts for 200 million users, the biggest market for WhatsApp, witnessed an outage well into New Year 2018. Several people vented their anger, but more shared funny memes and asked friends if they were also facing issues with WhatsApp on their phones via Twitter. Now, it has returned to normalcy.

"WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved", a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in a statement to Reuters.

There is no official word on what caused the issue, but it is most likely to be caused by a sudden spike in messaging and video/audio calls between billions of users to exchange new year greetings.

Here are some of the Tweets on WhatsApp outage:

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In a related development, WhatsApp has officially discontinued messaging service support for devices running BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, Microsoft Windows 8.0 or older version software. 

Read more: Why WhatsApp is ending support?

On a brighter note, WhatsApp is almost done with the beta testing the Private Reply feature in the WhatsApp group. It actually went live on several smartphones with v2.17.342 update, a couple of days ago, but was taken out immediately with new firmware v2.17.344.

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