New Delhi, Aug 2026 : Meta-owned WhatsApp users across several countries reported disruptions on Monday, with the outage appearing to affect the platform’s multimedia services, including the sharing of photos, videos, stickers, GIFs and other files.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, reports of problems began emerging early Monday morning, with complaints coming from users in multiple regions. The tracking platform indicated that around 41 per cent of reported issues were related to messaging, while 40 per cent concerned the application itself and another 13 per cent involved notifications.
For several users, basic text messaging continued to function normally, but sending or receiving multimedia content proved difficult. Photos and videos were reportedly taking considerably longer than usual to upload, while some files remained stuck during the uploading process.
Users described situations in which images appeared to have been selected for sharing but failed to complete the upload. Some reported persistent loading icons, while others received prompts asking them to retry the operation. Similar problems were reported while attempting to send stickers and GIFs, suggesting that the disruption may have been concentrated around WhatsApp’s multimedia-sharing infrastructure.
Larger media files appeared to be particularly affected, with some users reporting lengthy delays or complete failures when trying to upload them. The issue was not restricted to a particular network or country, with complaints emerging from India, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Colombia, among other locations.
The broad geographical spread of reports indicated that the problem could be linked to WhatsApp’s services rather than isolated connectivity issues affecting individual users. However, the precise scale of the disruption and the total number of users affected were not immediately clear.
As the complaints increased, users attempted several standard troubleshooting measures. These included restarting smartphones, switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data networks and reinstalling the WhatsApp application. However, several users said these measures failed to resolve the problem, particularly when they attempted to upload photographs and videos.
The outage tracker also showed that WhatsApp had received reports of service-related problems on Sunday, suggesting that the platform may have been experiencing intermittent issues around the same period.
Despite the growing number of user complaints, WhatsApp had not immediately issued an official statement explaining the reported disruption or indicating when full multimedia services would be restored.
WhatsApp is one of the world’s most widely used messaging platforms, and even temporary disruptions to its media-sharing functions can affect personal communication, business transactions and the exchange of important documents and information.
Users were therefore advised to wait for the service to stabilise if routine troubleshooting failed, while monitoring official updates from WhatsApp for further information.
(The content of this article is sourced from a news agency and has not been edited by the Mavericknews30 team.)
