WhatsApp users reported problems with the service just a day after the Facebook-owned messaging platform announced a new daily record of 64 billion messages.
WhatsApp, the renowned cross-platform instant messaging app, announced Tuesday that the company achieved a new record of handling 64 billion messages in just 24 hours. The heavy traffic on the service apparently caused some glitch in the servers as most users reported a delay in sending and receiving messages the following day. While the company is yet to confirm the service crash, this is the second major outage since Facebook bought the app in February.
The WhatsApp downtime was also reported by DownDetector, which monitors web problems. The site showed a sudden spike in reports of WhatsApp problems at around 3pm GMT (10am EDT), going higher than 3,000 before slowly dropping.
The problem was reported on all three major mobile platforms, with users of iOS, Android and Windows Phone smartphones reporting that the messages sending failed multiple times. WhatsApp showed it tried connecting to the internet for several minutes, but when the message was finally sent, recipients did not receive it for several minutes.
WhatsApp previously suffered a massive outage last month, which lasted for around 210 minutes. WhatsApp confirmed the outage, blaming the fault to be in the servers. This time, the company has stayed mum about the details.
For now, the service is back to normal with no reports of errors on DownDetector.
WhatsApp announced the new daily record in a tweet sent from the company's official Twitter account. The total 64 billion messages processed each day included 20 billion sent and 44 billion received messages. The difference in the figures is mainly because the group messaging setting, which counts a message sent to a group as one and counts messages received by group members separately. The company's previous record high was 54 billion messages on New Year's Eve last year.
new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
- WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014
The Facebook-WhatsApp deal was not entirely accepted by the users as it raised concerns over data privacy. Some users were so upset that they threatened to delete WhatsApp following the Facebook acquisition. Even so, the usage of service has exploded in the recent days. According to Daily Mail, the number of messages handled each day has spiked from 27 billion this time last year.
