A section of WhatsApp users today complained of an outage in service for a brief period and were unable to send or receive messages.
Emailed queries to the company did not elicit any response.
According to posts on various social media platforms, users complained they were unable to send or receive messages for about 30 minutes this afternoon.
India is home to over 200 million WhatsApp users. The Facebook-owned messaging platform has more than one billion users globally.
In August this year, there was a similar outage with services being affected in different parts of the world.
Users turned to platforms like Facebook and Twitter to vent out their frustration at not being able to use the service with ‘#WhatsAppDown’ beginning to trend.
A popular tweet read: “2 mins of silence for those who uninstalled and then installed WhatsApp again #WhatsAppDown“.
2 mins of silence for those who uninstalled and then installed WhatsApp again #WhatsAppDown
— #tech nerd (@techno_nerds) November 3, 2017
Another trending tweet was “WhatsApp msg not sent: Step 1: Restart Mobile Data Step 2: Restart phone Step 3: Check #Twitter #WhatsAppDown trending“.
Whatsapp msg not sent: Step 1: Restart Mobile Data Step 2: Restart phone Step 3: Check #Twitter#whatsappdown trending. Now I feel better!
— Gayatri Gambhir (@gayatri_171) November 3, 2017
A number of memes brought out the creative side of users.
A netizen shared a gif of cartoon character, Homer Simpson carrying a board saying ‘The End is Near’
Another user put up a post with pictures of Pakistani politician and former cricketer, Imran Khan smiling with the message “When you use blackberry messenger and aren’t affected by whatsapp being down”.
This moment when WhatsApp doesn’t work so you try to remember how to send an actual text #whatsappdownpic.twitter.com/KXyr77MTYO
— :) (@musicleadsus) November 3, 2017Divided by Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows, United by #WhatsAppDown .
— Aagam Shah (@aagamgshah) November 3, 2017First we used to check neighborhood from balcony to see if light has gone for everyone else too,Now we check twitter to see if #WhatsAppdown
— Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) November 3, 2017#WhatsApp is down. Singaporeans will no longer be able to communicate. Please do not panic. Helicopters have been dispatched. #WhatsAppDown
— mrbrown (@mrbrown) November 3, 2017500 people in India have already died because Whatsapp is down and they couldn't forward a chain message to 10 people. #WhatsappDown
— Anshu Mor (@anshuMor) November 3, 2017There’s still original text messaging #whatsappdown#whocares
— Rachael Allen (@rach88allen) November 3, 2017