Hongkongers breathe sigh of relief as WhatsApp service restored after nearly 2-hour global outage
- Operator Meta says service restored without explaining cause of disruption
- Topic WhatsApp becomes most trending one on Twitter in Hong Kong, with 539,000 tweets posted by around 4pm
Global web messenger platform WhatsApp resumed service on Tuesday afternoon after a nearly two-hour outage that affected Hong Kong users and others around the world.
Residents began encountering difficulties sending messages at around 3pm but by 4.50pm reported that some texts were finally getting through. WhatsApp’s operator Meta issued a statement an hour later saying the problem had been fixed.
“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today,” a spokesman said. “We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience.”
Meta earlier acknowledged it had received user complaints about service abnormalities but by evening had yet to reveal the reason for the outage.
WhatsApp, which counts more than 2 billion users around the world, is one of the most popular messaging platforms in Hong Kong, and residents took to Twitter and other social media platforms to report the disruption. By 4pm, WhatsApp was the most trending topic on Twitter in Hong Kong, with 539,000 tweets posted.
Complaints from residents also flooded Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, with 4,355 complaints filed to the site at 3.37pm. Complaints continued to stream in even after WhatsApp’s gradual recovery, with hundreds of reports made every minute at around 5pm.
Amazon and WhatsApp faced biggest fines in EU last year over data rules
Puzzled residents also turned to local online forum LIHKG to vent their frustration, saying their messages were stuck in limbo, with the problem affecting both the smartphone and web-based versions.
Some users claimed texts could still be sent but not received through one-on-one chats, while messages could not be delivered at all in group chats.
“I thought my phone went haywire,” one commentator wrote.
Some residents got around the communication breakdown by turning to Signal, an American messaging app that has become popular in Hong Kong since the imposition of the national security law in June 2020.
“Thank God I switched to Signal a long time ago, sending and receiving messages is [currently] very normal for me,” one commentator wrote on LIHKG.
WhatsApp and Signal use end-to-end encryption, which means no third party can read the transmitted messages, and also offers a “disappearing message” function that automatically deletes chats on both ends after a certain time has passed.
Signal was the most downloaded app on the Google Play store in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020, according to analytics company App Annie. The app also topped the social networking category of Apple’s iOS App Store at the time.
This was not the first time WhatsApp experienced a large-scale disruption: the messaging platform suffered an outage that lasted more than six hours, along with Facebook and Instagram, last October.
After its services were restored, Meta published a blog post the same day, attributing the cause of the outage to configuration changes on routers that coordinated network traffic between their data centres.
