WhatsApp blackout hits Kenya and other parts of world

Popular instant messaging app WhatsApp on Friday temporarily went down in Kenya and most parts of the world.

The blackout, estimated to have lasted 30 minutes, hit thousands of users in Kenya, with many unable to communicate with their friends and family.

SERVER

The messaging service initially appeared fine, with chats and contacts able to load.

However, it could not send data with a “connecting” message persisting without resolving.

Many were unable to send or receive texts, images, videos or make calls via the application owned by Facebook.

The glitch was attributed to a server problem and Facebook appears to be gradually restoring connectivity.

The problem was also reported in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Malaysia, Czech Republic, Israel, Spain, Malaysia, Turkey, Italy and Serbia.

11AM

According to DownDetector, a website that tracks site and app outages, thousands of WhatsApp customers reported problems with the app.

DownDetector said the WhatsApp's problems started at around 11am Kenyan time, with 60 percent of users unable to connect to it.

A further 25 per cent report issues receiving messages and 14 per cent were struggling login in.

Thousands of users were forced to switch to other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to either report or complain about the glitch.

OUTAGES

The temporary outage left many users in Kenya frustrated because there was no immediate communication from Facebook.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook (the app), WhatsApp does not maintain a customer-service page to give users information when the application is down.

It only has an official Twitter account but no information has been posted since 2014.

It is not the first time WhatsApp has gone down. A similar outage was reported in May this year.

The outages, mostly short-lived, sometimes take hours to resolve.

Additional reporting by Augustine Sang.