WhatsApp, Reddit and lots of other sites are down for many, AWS or CloudFlare likely to blame
One of the world’s most popular messaging services is currently inaccessible for many people, leaving them unable to use the service as expected. But that’s not the end of the issues.
The problems, which appear to have started around 13:00 GMT, have left some people able to log in, but unable to send or receive messages or calls.
However, some other people have found that they can send messages, but that they’re not being received (or vice versa).
In our testing, the service is working just fine but we’re having problems accessing some other sites.
Right now the problems seem mainly contained to the UK and some parts of Europe, according to Down Detector.
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With more than a billion users, when WhatsApp goes down, people notice pretty damn quickly, so we can’t imagine the downtime lasting very long.
Of course, for anyone who charges for WhatsApp contact (like camgirls, for example) it’s leaving them out of contact with fans and customers. Update: With the knock on problems now becoming apparent, there are a whole lot of adult webmasters out there who will be nervous about keeping their sites online.
Better start using my SMS allowance – #aws going down has killed #whatsapp the 90's has come back to haunt me
— Sam Winslet (@the_winslet) June 20, 2016
It’s unclear if the outage is related to ongoing issues with CloudFlare or AWS but we’ll update once the issue is fixed.
Update #1, 14:20 GMT:
Problems seem to be spreading to other internet services and sites that use the CloudFlare’s CDN, including but not limited to Reddit, WhatsApp and Slack.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Unclear whether it’s #AWS or #CloudFlare issue preventing access to popular services like Spotify” quote=”However, it’s unclear whether it’s an AWS or CloudFlare problem preventing access to world’s most popular services right now”]
CloudFlare’s status page says, “CloudFlare is observing network performance issues in some European locations. We are actively working to reduce or eliminate any impact to Internet users in this region.”
Amazon Web Services’ Twitter account has also tweeted that it is suffering connectivity issues, compounding the problem.
AWS Internet Connectivity (Ireland) – Network Connectivity – 6:12 AM PDT We are investigating an issue with an external provider outside of
— Unofficial AWS SHD (@aws_shd) June 20, 2016
our network, which may be impacting Internet connectivity between some customer networks and the EU-WEST-1 Region. Connectivity to instances
— Unofficial AWS SHD (@aws_shd) June 20, 2016
and services within the Region is not impacted by the
— Unofficial AWS SHD (@aws_shd) June 20, 2016
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