WhatsApp has gone down for users around the world, making it impossible to send and receive messages.

Complaints from its global community of users first started to hit social media at shortly after 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, October 25.

At the time of writing, those opening the app are being met with a “connecting” message at the top of the display, together with a spinning wheel. However, others parts of the interface, such as message history, are still showing.

In a widely reported statement, Meta, which owns WhatsApp, said a team is currently working to resolve the issue. “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” the company said.

With a community of users believed to exceed two billion, WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world. On average, as many as 100 billion messages are reportedly shared on the platform daily, so Tuesday’s disruption is bound to be keenly felt.

It’s the first major outage for WhatsApp since a similar one 12 months ago that also affected other Meta services such as Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. The downtime lasted almost six hours and was put down to an error during routine maintenance work. This time around it appears that only WhatsApp is affected.

As is customary under such circumstances, many users went straight to Twitter to sound off about the situation or simply drop some quips about the unexpected turn of events.

People Coming to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is down#WhatsappDown pic.twitter.com/eGi25KiQhU

— Bella Ciao (Chai) (@punjabiii_munda) October 25, 2022

Me after refreshing my airplane mode and restarting my phone 23 times and I came on Twitter to see that WhatsApp is down 😫😫 #WhatsApp #whatsappdown pic.twitter.com/fIRSrXBlMq

— Blessing Amos (@Tianakeys_) October 25, 2022

WhatsApp launched in 2009 and five years later was acquired by Meta — then Facebook — for $19 billion.