“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms (META.O) told Reuters.

The company did not disclose the reason for the outage.

The outage tracking website Downdetector said that more than 3,000 reports of outages were reported by 12:26pm in Pakistan. At around 0750 GMT, the outage reporting site had shown over 68,000 users had reported problems with the app in the United Kingdom. Problems were reported by 19,000 people in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa, as well.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may have affected a larger number of users.

In October 2021, major social media services including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were hit by a massive outage, impacting potentially tens of millions of users.

Shares of WhatsApp-parent Meta Platforms (META.O) fell 0.7% to $128.85 in premarket trading following the outage.

The company had not sent any fresh updates as users in Asia, India and the United Kingdom started seeing some connections come back online.

#whatsappdown was trending on Twitter, with more than 142000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet.

Many social media users described Twitter as an alternate option for the popular messaging service.

This user shared the screenshot of the famous Spanish TV series Money Heist.

One of the users tried to describe his attempts to use the app while the service was down.

This one showed how many people switched to Twitter.