Prime Highlights

• WhatsApp faced a global outage on April 12, 2025, affecting message sending, connectivity, and call ability.
• The outage was felt by both web and mobile users, and India was among the most affected.

Key Facts

• More than 3,000 instances of the outage were complained about in India; 90% were complaints regarding sending messages.
• There were 2,800+ complainants experiencing issues worldwide, primarily messaging.
• Parent Meta has not made any official announcement.

Key Background

There was a global service outage by WhatsApp users on April 12, 2025, for messaging and connectivity options on the site. The service outage started around 8:56 PM IST, and the reports started coming in shortly afterwards. Both WhatsApp Web and the mobile application were impacted, with users being unable to send and receive messages as well as place calls.

India was among the worst-affected nations, with data on Downdetector indicating more than 3,000 report complaints by Indian users for a service outage. Over 90% of the complaints were of obvious message send failures. The remaining complaints were server connectivity issues as well as universal app failures. There were approximately 2,800 similar complaint reports worldwide indicating the magnitude of the outage.

The extent of the problem led to a flood of user responses across social media, particularly on X (formerly Twitter), as top trending hashtags such as #whatsappdown shortly followed. Users complained, requested verification from others, and posted memes as they patiently awaited services to be restored. The disruption brought into perspective WhatsApp’s central place in personal and business communication for millions.

Even though the size of the outage, Meta’s parent company of WhatsApp, didn’t make any official statement when the service started going back online, the silence about the cause or extent of the outage made users and industry analysts anxious.

This blackout is part of a pattern of regular outages across Meta’s network, including Facebook and Instagram. Even though the services were eventually restored, the outage points to the broad reliance on digital platforms and the need for infrastructure resilience and live transparency during periods of crisis.