WhatsApp users were caught breathless on Saturday night when one of the most popular messaging services experienced a temporary server crash.
Users of WhatsApp reported on Saturday that the rapidly expanding mobile messaging app was down, just days after its acquisition by Facebook for $19 billion.
Seconds after WhatsApp stopped working, the app users took to other forms of social media, including blogs, to report the outage and vent their frustration.
The social media was abuzz with tweets and Facebook messages such as: “What happened to WhatsApp? I almost got a heart attack!”, “I liked WhatsApp! (feeling annoyed)”, “What is Zuckerberg doing to WhatsApp?”, “Give us back our WhatsApp”, “WhatsApp not working. WhatsApp not working. *Hyperventilates*”, “My wats app is not working….. Cant live without it … Plzz fix it ..”
Responding to the breakdown, WhatsApp said in a tweet to its more than 1 million Twitter followers on Saturday around midnight, “Sorry we are currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”
After three long and “well-panicked” hours, the application’s server was finally restored, with WhatsApp users cheering out loud while heading back to their messaging world.
Five-year-old WhatsApp currently has about 450 million users globally and has been adding a million daily.