Have you messaged anyone on WhatsApp this morning and found that your message is stuck at “pending”? You’re not alone. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is down, and it seems it has been for a few hours judging by the varied reports spreading across the Internet.
The good news is that for every one of your friends that you contact via WhatsApp, there’s probably at least 3 other ways to contact them as you can see from the useful (credit: XKCD) image below.
Seriously though, yes, an outage of your preferred messaging platform is a massive inconvenience, but WhatsApp — which actually has an uncannily good uptime record — undoubtedly has engineers working to right what’s gone wrong, and restore the service.
In the meantime, you can take to Facebook and tell everyone that WhatsApp is down, or you can use one of the dozen other messaging apps on your phone to tell everyone WhatsApp is down, or you could even call the person you’re communicating with — to tell them that WhatsApp is down — as a stop-gap until service is restored.
There are dozens of messaging apps out there. Whats your alternative to WhatsApp?
I hear SMS is still working.
Always use WeChat and it’s much better than WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. WeChat teaches them how to be a good messaging app.
NSA upgrade?
mine’s working.