WhatsApp suffers brief outage, causes massive freakout among users

WhatsApp went down briefly on Thursday, preventing users from sending messages on New Year's Eve.

According to DownDetector, a website that keeps track of service interruptions and outages, the WhatsApp outage is primarily isolated to the UK and Germany. The U.S. appears to be largely unaffected.

The Facebook-owned messaging app has a user base of more than 900 million and works cross-platform with iOS and Android devices, making it a more practical alternative to iOS's iMessage. With more than 10 billion messages sent every day, it's no wonder the people across the globe freaked out when the service went down. Read more...