WhatsApp today encountered major outages across the globe as users were greeted with an unending loading wheel when they tried to send media files such as images and voice notes. The app was able to send basic text messages without any problem; however, the rich media capabilities failed totally. Here’s the entire analysis of what went down, why it happened, and why your troubleshooting procedure didn’t work.
In This Article
WhatsApp Outage: Texts Worked, Media Froze
Downdetector showed a spike in user complaints regarding service failures from early Monday morning across major global markets like India, the UK, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Colombia. The outage mostly affected the multimedia services, with users reporting problems uploading pictures, videos, voice notes, stickers and GIFs, but text messaging was generally unaffected. The complaints were broken down into three categories: 41% were linked to message delivery, 40% were related to app functioning and 13% were connected to system notifications.
Why it happened and why did troubleshooting fail?
WhatsApp’s messaging system uses a lightweight gateway for text messaging and a media CDN (Content Delivery Network) for transferring larger files like photos and videos. Text messaging uses WebSocket connections optimized for minimal bandwidth, making text transfer efficient. However, the process is more complex when a media file is sent. The file is first encrypted on the sender’s device and sent to Meta’s CDN. After the upload, the system creates an encrypted media pointer token, which is passed to the receiver via the text messaging gateway.
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A major problem was identified in the media upload process during a recent outage, which caused media file uploads to fail and also stopped the creation of media pointer tokens. This outage compromised the general operation of the app, as users could still send text messages but could not successfully attach or forward media content.
The glitch left millions of WhatsApp users mistakenly believing the issue was localised. To fix the problem, several users tried a number of troubleshooting procedures, including turning Airplane Mode on and off, switching between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and reinstalling the WhatsApp app. But these local fixes didn’t work since the main reason was a server-side media processing issue emanating from Meta’s edge data centres.
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Current Status
Meta’s technical team has rolled out a reroute of traffic from degraded media storage clusters, which has cleared the backlog of pending media uploads. Therefore, the services connected to media uploading, voice notes, and picture sharing are now working well. Users seeing media trapped in a “spinning wheel” condition may hit Retry or resend the file, allowing for immediate delivery.
