By Alfred Koroma
In the early hours of Tuesday 25th October 2022, popular messaging platform went down for users across the world, including Sierra Leone. Many people complained that they were unable to send and receive messages.
The messaging platform began reporting issues just before 08:00 BST on Tuesday. And more than 12,000 reports were posted within half an hour, according to the service status website Down Detector, BBC reports.
“Massaging app WhatsApp is currently experiencing international outages; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering,” an internet monitoring group, NetBlocks twitted during the shutdown.
A spokesperson for Meta who spoke to the BBC said “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.”
This is not the first time WhatsApp users have experienced the messaging platform going down. Last year, the messaging platform went down as part of a six-hour outage.
WhatsApp owned by Meta has about two billion users globally and is one of the most popular messaging platforms in Sierra Leone.
The platform has increased citizens’ democratic participation in governance, but it is also being used wrongly. The popular massaging app has also been linked to recent violence in the country. Through its group chatting, WhatsApp is now a suitable platform where propagandists share fake news and plan anti-government protest.
