Thousands of users across Europe, America and Canada were unable to connect to WhatsApp on both Android and iOS yesterday.

People were unable to respond to existing chats, start new ones or use the messaging app’s WhatsApp web service.

It would seem that the sheer number of worldwide users sending and receiving New Year messages to family and loved ones caused the system to collapse resulting in the outage that lasted several minutes.

Even though the outage lasted for just under an hour before it was fixed, it was the first time that the world popular app has suffered a malfunction on such worldwide magnitude.

The issues began just as the night of New Years Eve was beginning, for many around the world, likely being one of the most busy nights for the service. It also came at the end of a day of high-profile outages, which began with problems at the BBC in the morning.

The last time WhatsApp revealed its user numbers, in September,it said that over 900 million people were on the service. But that has likely grown quickly — it said at the same time that it had gained 100 million new users in five months.

A spokesman for the company said

“Some people have had trouble accessing WhatsApp for a short period today. We’re working to restore service back to 100% for everyone and we apologize for the inconvenience.”

A leaked screenshot recently revealed the messaging app is testing a video call function to rival the likes ofApple’s FaceTime and Microsoft’s Skype.

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