By A Correspondent- Users are experiencing challenges with sending or receiving messages on the platform WhatsApp in a development indicating that the app is facing a glitch.

Thousands of WhatsApp users across the world reported they were unable to send and receive messages on Tuesday morning, suggesting the popular chat platform was suffering a major outage.

The WhatsApp Downdetector page showed a surge in user reports in South Africa and abroad from around 09:00 (SAST).

A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company was aware that “some people” were having trouble sending messages and that it was working to restore the service for everyone as quickly as possible.

Several MyBroadband staff members and readers were unable to send or receive messages using the WhatsApp Android, iOS, or desktop apps.

Attempting to do so would only show the loading clock icon next to the message, indicating it had not finished sending.

On the desktop app, one staff member was getting a “Connecting to WhatsApp” error, as shown below.

Selecting the “Retry Now” button did not resolve the issue.

Another staff member received a notification from WhatsApp that he might have unread messages, but did not see any when opening the app.

The graph from Downdetector shows the increase in reports of problems using WhatsApp in Southern Africa on Tuesday, 25 October 2022.

At 10:00 on Tuesday, Meta Platforms updated its WhatsApp Business API status page to acknowledge the disruption.

“We are aware of major disruptions impacting the ability to send messages via the WhatsApp Business Platform. Our teams are working to mitigate the issue,” it stated.

The outage is affecting WhatsApp’s cloud API and on-premises solution.

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