WHATSAPP FAILURE. The Whatsapp messaging service was hit by a giant bug this Wednesday, July 19, 2023. Many users complained in the evening that they could not access the instant messaging service, owned by the Meta group.

Updated July 19, 2023 10:56 PM] If you had trouble accessing your Whatsapp account on Wednesday evening, July 19, 2023, you were not alone. A bug, visibly affecting many countries, was reported by users, and confirmed at the end of the evening by Whatsapp. The Whatsapp outage was apparently resolved around 11 p.m. French time. Many Internet users, in France but also abroad, complained during the evening of difficulties in accessing the instant messaging application. The bug was confirmed by the American company at 10:45 p.m. French time, in particular through a post on the official Whatsapp Twitter account.

“We are working to quickly resolve Whatsapp connection issues and will update you as soon as possible,” reads a short post. The official Facebook page had previously been flooded with comments and reports from users in many countries.

The first alerts were reported at the beginning of the evening this Wednesday, confirmed by the editorial staff who were able to actually see this bug. A connection wheel that spins endlessly, messages that cannot be sent, the impossibility of updating a conversation thread… The problems were multiple and visibly linked to a major application failure.

The Whatsapp bug does not come from your internet connection at home or mobile (3G, 4G, 5G). Rather, it is a failure affecting the service itself. Your internet connection is not in question and you can also connect to other applications and websites. The outage on Wednesday July 19 seemed to affect France like many other European and global countries. The problem ended around 11 p.m. French time.

What bugs have Whatsapp users encountered? Many Internet users have complained of difficulties or even the impossibility of sending messages to their loved ones via Whatsapp. Others just couldn’t connect. The most common bug sees the application display a loading wheel next to the mention “Connection”, the loading not being done. In this case, the contents that one then tries to send to his contacts are not transmitted. When manifesting this problem, there is no way to bypass it by opening your Whatsapp app.

This bug affected Whatsapp only and not the Facebook site which is part of the same Meta group. This giant Whatsapp outage comes 9 months after a giant global bug that hit Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp.

This is indeed not the first time that Whatsapp has faced such a problem, the last bug of international scope dating back to Tuesday, October 25, 2022. The popular instant messaging application was unresponsive, in many countries, from 8:50 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. French time that day. The Meta Group, which owns Whatsapp but also Facebook and Instagram, had communicated an hour after the start of this giant outage: “We are aware that some people are currently having difficulty sending messages and we are working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible, “said a spokesperson for Meta Platforms with the Reuters news agency.

Since its restructuring and its change of identity, the tech group built around Facebook has been working to reduce this type of bugs, which weaken its image, while issues of security and access to services have become extremely important issues. A previous bug, which occurred on Monday October 4, 2021, affected millions of users worldwide and lasted nearly 7 hours! The Meta group then opened an internal investigation and admitted that a serious bug had affected its servers.