People worldwide took to various social media such as Twitter and Facebook to complain about the shutdown.
Finally talking to my family, they seem like nice people. #WhatsApp is down
— GQ (@GQ_Spot) May 3, 2017
We never had these problems with Mxit 🤷🏽♀️ #WhatsApp
— Z🎀 (@zanophike_) May 4, 2017
We have #WhatsApp back on people!! 😩 was a scary two hours 🙈😂😂
— Tish E Guich (@Tish_E_Guich) May 3, 2017
Waiting for #WhatsApp to come back like pic.twitter.com/CAepJYFT30
— RICK STUDLY (@STUD6699) May 3, 2017
#Whatsapp is not dead forever! pic.twitter.com/53wwf6NUhB
— Waleed Akhtar (@AkhtarWaleed) May 3, 2017
#WhatsApp being down could be an experiment to see if everyone defaults to #Facebook messenger, because we know that's what they want.
— 🙄 (@conspiracyman13) May 3, 2017
However, WhatsApp is back up after suffering an outage that affected users around the world for hours.
The Facebook-owned messaging service confirmed in a media statement that it had been inaccessible, but did not say why.
“Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologize for the inconvenience,” said a WhatsApp spokesperson in an email.