Popular messaging app WhatsApp was slowly coming back online by 5pm local time on Tuesday, with some users in Hong Kong, India and the United Kingdom saying they were able to send and receive some messages and videos, after users across the world reported issues with the platform earlier.

At around 3.50pm local time, outage reporting site Downdetector showed over 68,000 users had reported problems with the app in the United Kingdom. Problems were reported by 19,000 people in Singapore and 15,000 people in South Africa, it said.

The app has become a critical means of communication for households and businesses. When Whatsapp had an hours-long outage last October, it hit trading of assets from cryptocurrencies to oil, before traders switched to alternative platforms such as Telegram.

The app's latest outage comes during the festive season in India – its biggest market by user count – when people use the platform even more than usual to send season's greetings.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform. The outage may have affected a larger number of users.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we're working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible," a Meta spokesperson said in response to the outage.

Meta later said the issue had been fixed. "We have fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience," the firm said.

The company did not disclose the reason for the outage.

The hashtag #whatsappdown was trending on Twitter, with more than 70,000 tweets and hundreds of memes flooding the internet.

The incident follows a massive service outage for South Korea's messaging app KakaoTalk that left more than 50 million without access to its widely used services for days. (Additional reporting by Reuters)
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Last updated: 2022-10-25 HKT 21:59