As many across the world said welcome to the New Year, they wanted to share their joy with family and friends, and WhatsApp was one of the means of choice.
However, for some users of the app in Europe, United States and Canada, that was not to be as the popular platform crashed due to what was believed to be too much traffic. This occurred across iOS and Android platforms.
In some parts, existing chats could not open and instead replaced the name of the person or group with a spinning wheel and the word ‘connecting’.
In yet others, the major problem was that users could not connect to the internet, even when they had a working data plan or WiFi connectivity.
The outage reportedly occurred around 16.28GMT and lasted for 45 minutes before being resolved. It then happened again, reports said.
However, a spokesman for WhatsApp said the company was working to ensure that service was restored to a 100 percent for users that were affected.
“Some people have had trouble accessing WhatsApp for a short period today.
‘We’re working to restore service back to 100% for everyone and we apologize for the inconvenience,” he said.
Full service have since been restored.