What’s happening to WhatsApp, the most popular instant messaging app? For the second time this month, users across the world have been left unable to use the messaging app for unknown reasons yesterday afternoon.
The crash was experienced in many countries around the world, especially in Europe. Disappointed users living in the UK, northern Europe, Italy, Spain, parts of South America, Mexico, New York and San Francisco reported yesterday afternoon serious connection issues and problems sending and receiving messages, uploading conversations and even logging into the app.
Trying to find a solution, thousands of users have immediately reported the problem and have used Twitter to share their issues. According to DownDetector, about 56 percent of complaints were about connection issues, while, according to The Independent, 32 percent of users were having trouble receiving messages.
The DailyMail.com has promptly contacted the Facebook-owned instant messaging app to know more about the outage, but no-one has responded yet, so we still don’t have an explanation on the matter. Fact is that WhatsApp is recently experiencing quite often this kind of mysterious problems, and its many users are literally left in the dark. This is in fact the second blackout this month for WhatsApp, while the first one was on New Year’s Eve.
Despite its growing success, WhatsApp is facing quite a difficult period. Besides the crashes above, the issues related with the data-sharing with Facebook are far from being over, and the battle with many authorities responsible for the privacy of users around the world has just begun.
Just a few days ago Italian’s antitrust authorities have fined WhatsApp 3 Million Euros. And now the European Union antitrust regulators have decided that they would fine Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, €110m for providing misleading information. That’s what the Commission said: “The Commission has found that, contrary to Facebook’s statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users’ identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility,”.