WhatsApp Said to Have Submitted Report to IT Ministry on Service Outage

Messaging platform WhatsApp has submitted its report to the IT ministry on the service outage that happened on Tuesday, according to government sources.

The ministry had asked the Meta-owned messaging platform to share reasons for the service disruption.

WhatsApp services snag on Tuesday had left users complaining about not being able to send or receive text and video messages, and services had resumed after nearly two hours.

The sources said that WhatsApp has submitted its report on the service outage. Details about the submissions could not be immediately ascertained. An e-mail sent to WhatsApp on the issue did not elicit a response.

In a late night statement on Tuesday, WhatsApp said a “technical error” caused the outage.

“The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved,” a Meta company spokesperson had said.

According to Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, the messaging app was not working for many users across multiple regions on Tuesday afternoon. At one point during the outage on Tuesday, over 29,000 reports were flagged by users on Downdetector.

Downdetector’s heatmap had showed that WhatsApp users in major cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata, were impacted by the snag.

It was reported on Wednesday that the Ministry of Information Technology has sought a detailed report from social media giant WhatsApp. Union Minister for Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw also confirmed this to ANI, saying, “We have lakhs of WhatsApp users across the country and we asked for a detailed report from the company about the outage.”

Sources aware of the development told ANI that Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, has been given a week’s time to submit its report to the Indian government.