WhatsApp global outage: here's what we know

Founder at World Wide Worx Arthur Goldstuck says just after 09:00 on Tuesday, reports began emerging that the messaging service was not functioning anymore.

"The first indication that Whatsapp was going down was at 09:04 this morning when the Website Downdetector - which reports outages - had some from almost zero or one reports to 300 reports. A few minutes later, at 09:19am, there was almost 3000 reports and then it went to about 5000 reports. That was an indicator that an outage was spreading worldwide, clearly Whatsapp is out across the world," Goldstuck explains

Social media users said they were unable to connect to the app or send messages.

"The monitoring site had said that there was an incorrect configuration which means that someone changed the settings for how WhatsApp connects to the world,” Goldstuck.

“In the last incident, someone had to physically go to a data centre to find the plug that had been put into the wrong port. It was a source of great amusement worldwide and we will find something just as arbitrary this time but I am sure they won't have the same issue as last year."

US tech giant Meta confirmed a global outage was affecting its messaging service WhatsApp on Tuesday.

"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," a Meta spokesman told AFP.