WhatsApp appears to have stopped working, with users unable to send some messages.
While text appears to work, photos, videos and voice messages will not send through, according to various reports.
Instead, users just see a message reading “download failed” and the content will not arrive.
The same error message advises users to ask for the picture to be sent over again. But doing so does not seem to work.
Unusually, a preview of the picture does appear to be able to get through. It means that recipients can see a version of the pictures that are being sent – but it is fuzzy and the details cannot be seen.
Sometimes, an error message will show confirming that something has gone wrong, though it does not appear to show up every time.
The wording of the error messages appears to change for different users. But many of them suggest solutions that don’t actually seem to work.
“Couldn’t download image,” one seen by EntebbeNews reads.
“Try again. If the problem keeps happening, try turning off Wi-Fi or VPN, or connecting to a different Wi-Fi network.”
Complaints particularly came from the UK and South America, according to the outage tracking website Down Detector. The number of reports were relatively limited for a WhatsApp outage – but that might be a consequence of the strangely specific nature of the problem.
