By Raju Vernekar
Mumbai, Oct. 28:
Messaging platform WhatsApp on Thursday submitted its report on Tuesday’s service outage to the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in response to the letter sent seeking clarification by the ministry on Wednesday.
The ministry had asked the Meta-owned messaging platform to share reasons for the longest-ever service disruption- whether it was due to an internal glitch or a cyberattack. The ministry had asked the platform to submit its report to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, a nodal agency under the MeitY.
WhatsApp services snag on Tuesday had left users complaining about not being able to send or receive text and video messages, and services had resumed after nearly two hours.
According to official sources, WhatsApp has submitted its report on the service outage. Following the outage, WhatsApp said a technical error had caused the disruption in services.
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms had said adding that the brief outage was a result of a technical snag which was subsequently resolved.
WhatsApp did not work for many users across multiple regions. The major outage cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata that were impacted by the technical snag. The services resumed after nearly two hours but not for all.
#whatsappdown was trended on Twitter on Tuesday, with over 142,000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet and pushing people to use other social media apps for communication.
Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray faction on Thursday targeted the Centre for asking Meta to submit a report on the global outage. Taking a swipe at the central government, Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi said in a tweet that she “didn’t know WhatsApp is part of an essential service or a welfare scheme” provided or paid by the government.
Ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit the world forcing people to work from home, WhatsApp has become a critical means of communication. The instant messaging app has over 500 million users in India and has become ubiquitous in the country.
In October 2021, all the three of its social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—had suffered a nearly seven-hour outage, which the company had then said was caused due to “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic” among the different Meta data centres. The outage hit the trading of assets from crypto currencies to oil.
