Popular messaging service WhatsApp came back online Wednesday evening after the app suffered a global outage that halted user communication for several hours, the company said.
“Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologize for the inconvenience,” WhatsApp said in a statement to Reuters.
WhatsApp went down in parts of India, Canada, the U.S. and Brazil, Reuters reported, adding that the outage affected users on Apple’s iOS operating system, Google Android devices and Microsoft Windows’ mobile operating system.
A number of Twitter users expressed their frustrations earlier Wednesday:
WhatsApp, which was purchased by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, has more than 1.2 billion users around the world. Many users who communicate between different countries use the service for messaging when phone calls or text messages are not an option.
