April 2, 2014 / 3:45 PM

WhatsApp faces outage after handling record number of messages

This is the second outage to hit the messaging app -- the first occurred only days after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook.

WhatsApp reached a new record 64 billion messages handled in 24 hours. (Credit: WhatsApp)

WhatsApp reached a new record 64 billion messages handled in 24 hours. (Credit: WhatsApp)

MENLO PARK, Calif., April 2 (UPI) -- Messaging app WhatsApp faced its second major outage since being acquired by Facebook, with the service either not working or running slowly.

The service was facing problems early Wednesday morning, around 8:34 a.m. EDT, according to DownDetector.com, a site that monitors web companies’ outages. The messaging service has yet to confirm the details of the outage.

"Sorry, our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience," was the message some users reported seeing.

This comes a day after the service tweeted an explosion in the number of messages it was handling. The company said it had hit a new record high of 64 billion messages handled within 24 hours, which included 20 billion messages sent and 44 billion messages received. New Year's Eve 2013 was the last time the company hit a record high -- handling 54 billion messages that night.

new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014

WhatsApp's last outage lasted less than four hours, showing their capability to bounce back quickly from a server failure. The outage occurred a few days after it was acquired by social network giant Facebook for $19 billion.

[TechCrunch]

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