The chat service WhatsApp seems to have this Tuesday night apparently with massive disruption worldwide. Under the hashtag "WhatsAppdown" many users described from 19 o'clock on Twitter that they could not send or receive messages.

The disorder apparently affected numerous countries worldwide. The online troubles detectors downdetector.com and allestörung.de were particularly troublesome in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil. Also in other parts of the world such as South Africa, India, Mexico as well as the east and the west coast of the world it came to failures. In some countries, the main cities were affected, such as London or Vienna.

After about an hour, the problem seemed to be largely eliminated. Messages could be sent and received again.

With over one billion users, WhatsApp is one of the highest-reach messaging services. Errors in the messaging service occur again and again. The biggest competitors in terms of numbers are the in-house App Facebook Messenger and the Chinese service WeChat. Chat apps such as Signal, Threema or Telegram have significantly fewer users in Germany than WhatsApp.

Read here: Why WhatsApp now restricts the forwarding of messages