By Juliet Umeh

The popular Meta-owned social media messaging platform, WhatsApp, restored its services yesterday after billions of users in different parts of world, including Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States and 12 other countries, experienced outage for some hours.

The outage affected both personal and group chats alike. WhatsApp Web was also affected by the outage, with the app’s web client unable to access the platform.

A technology tracker firm, Down Detector, confirmed that the platform did not work in several countries.

Apart from Nigeria, other countries affected in the problem, according to Down Detector, include: South Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil, Uganda, Zambia, the United Kingdom, and parts of the United States.

It claimed the problem started on Monday by 7: 00pm but was not obvious.

It noted that around 8:00 am yesterday, users of the platform started reporting inability to send or receive messages.

In response to the development, Meta spokesperson, in a statement released yesterday, said the company acknowledged the outage, adding that it was working to get it fixed.

The statement read: “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages, and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”

However, WhatsApp services are back online and the app now working for Android and iOS apps as well as via WhatsApp Web.

In October 2021, WhatsApp and other Meta products suffered a six-hour outage that multiple security experts also blamed a domain name system, DNS, issue as possible culprit.

The outage yesterday is the second in 2022, with the first happening in March.

It also marked the worst outage for the tech giant since 2008, when a bug knocked Facebook offline for about a day