WhatsApp blames latest outage on network router
Outages have been a persistent problem for the messaging app, but the latest was one of the longest and biggest, says the company's founder.
A glitch that took down the WhatsApp messaging service Saturday was caused by a network router issue, the company said on Sunday.
The service was unavailable to a large number of users as of around 11 a.m. PT Saturday, a problem confirmed by WhatsApp's "WhatsApp Status" Twitter feed. WhatsApp was back in service by 2:47 p.m. PT on Saturday, according to an updated tweet.
On Sunday, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum issued a statement placing the blame on a network router.
"We are sorry about the downtime," Koum said in the statement sent to Reuters. "It has been our longest and biggest outage in years. It was caused by a network router fault which cascaded into our servers. We worked with our service provider on resolving the issue and making sure it will not happen again."
The timing of the outage was less than ideal as it came just a few days after Facebook announced that it would pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. And outages don't seem too unusual for WhatsApp. A review of the app's status feed shows some type of outage or service interruption occurring on a fairly regular basis.