WhatsApp restored after brief suspension

Users of popular social media messaging application WhatsApp were able to send and receive messages after a brief suspension in Pakistan and several other countries of the world.  

Twitter users had complained of the application not functioning.

Apart from Pakistan, there reports that WhatsApp was not working for users in the UK, Singapore, India, Middle East and Ukraine. 

According to IT expert Touseef Ikram, the WhatsApp outage started at around 1:10PM and lasted for 45 minutes for most parts of the world. “While this is the first outage that affected Pakistan to this extent it is not the first time WhatsApp was down or having issues. In October alone it faced these issues five times, in September 15 times and in August 11 times.”

Mr Ikram added that WhatsApp was pursuing an aggressive upgradation strategy to combat rivals such as Snapchat and to start the monetization process through WhatsApp business. “These issues could be related to making these structural changes in the chat app which probably was not envisioned back in 2009 when it started.” 

Channel NewsAsia reported that in a notice under the "Help" section of the mobile application, it said: "Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly."