WhatsApp users in India faced an outage over the weekend, with many users reporting difficulties in downloading videos on the app. The disruption began on Sunday night and continued on Monday as well.
Many users took to Twitter to complain about the issue, which appears to have largely affected Android beta users. According to Downdetector, 43% of WhatsApp users encountered problems while using the app. The majority of the issues, about 41%, are believed to stem from server connection problems, while 16% reported difficulties in sending messages.
The Meta-owned messaging service is reportedly developing a new feature that will allow its 2.24 billion users to record and share short video messages of up to 60 seconds within their chats. Similar to the existing voice message feature, the new feature will allow users to record and send videos of up to 60 seconds by just pressing the camera button.
This is not the first time WhatsApp has suffered an outage. In October last year, the messaging app witnessed a two-hour service disruption that affected users in Europe and other parts of the world. In a statement, Meta had said that a ‘technical error’ caused the disruption and said that the issue had been resolved.
The Indian government has recently been cracking down on big tech platforms, with WhatsApp coming under scrutiny. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is conducting an investigation into WhatsApp’s privacy policy update of March 2021. WhatsApp had moved the Supreme Court after the Delhi High Court ruled in favour of a CCI probe. In early 2021, the CCI started a probe into WhatsApp over its policy updates alleging preferential treatment to business accounts by leveraging conversations on the app for targeted advertising.
According to a Statista report, India has over 487 million WhatsApp users, making it the biggest market for the company. The latest outage highlights the importance of ensuring that messaging services remain reliable, especially in countries where they are widely used for communication and business purposes.
