WhatsApp outage in South Africa and other parts of the world

WhatsApp appears to be down for an extended period of time, affecting both South Africa and many other parts of the world.

Users across all South African mobile networks reported that the service began acting strangely on Tuesday morning.

Similar stories have emerged from Europe and India.

When attempting to send messages, users initially saw a single tick. Users were seeing the clock icon at the time of publication, indicating that messages were still being sent, but no messages appeared to be going through.

When some users tried to use WhatsApp through a web browser, they received the error message “Make sure your computer has an active internet connection.” Those who had an open WhatsApp Web instance were greeted with the message “Retrying…” and an invitation to retry by clicking a link.

Users who were frustrated reported restarting WhatsApp and rebooting their phones, as well as blaming Wi-Fi and mobile data connections, before realizing the issue was with WhatsApp.

One-on-one and group chats are both affected by the outage.

WhatsApp did not immediately confirm the outage or provide any additional information regarding the matter.