Whatsapp, a popular messaging application, was having technical trouble earlier on Saturday. This happened right after a $19 billion buyout from Facebook. After being down for a few hours, the app service was restored.
According to UT San Diego, the app began not working properly at around noon on Saturday. By 2:30 p.m., users began to tweet that the app was once again working.
Service outages like this aren’t rare at all and actually happen pretty sporadically. If you look at Whatsapp’s Twitter account, you will see that the company reported multiple outages last year.
Whatsapp was created in 2009 and has 450 million monthly users worldwide. It is described as a “cross-platform mobile messaging app” that is very popular among tourists and people oversea. It is free to download and use for a year; after that, it charges 99 cents a year for unlimited messaging.
The program was recently purchased by Facebook for $19 billion just a few days ago. CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that the amount of monthly users will increase to 1 billion in the coming years, reports ABC News.
Whatsapp took to Twitter to apologize to users and ensure that the app was back up and running.