MeitY writes to Meta inquiring about two-hour WhatsApp outage: Report

The ministry has asked WhatsApp to coordinate with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) to find out if there were any "untoward" cyber incidents during the period of outage

The central government has asked Meta about the reasons behind the two-hour WhatsApp outage on Tuesday. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), according to a report in the Economic Times (ET), wants to know if the disruption was due to an internal glitch or a cyberattack. 

"We have asked them if the outage was due to internal factors or some external cyberattack. They will respond with the relevant details in a few days," a senior ministry official was quoted as saying by ET. 

The ministry has also asked the platform to coordinate with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) to find out if there were any "untoward" cyber incidents during the period of outage, the report added.

On Tuesday, users were not able to send or receive messages on WhatsApp for nearly two hours. It was among the longest outages the platform has ever faced. After the issue was fixed, Meta said that it had "fixed the issue". 

However, no explanation of the reason for the outage has been provided by the company. It is the second such outage faced by WhatsApp in less than one year. In October 2021, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, all three platforms owned by Meta were down for over seven hours. The company had said that it was due to "configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic".

On Tuesday, users faced issues not only with the platform's app, but also with WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp Pay. 

India has over 50 million users of WhatsApp.