Meta under government scanner after what’s app blackout
After an almost two-hour-long outage on Tuesday, WhatsApp is now being investigated by the authorities. Meta has been requested by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to provide a report on the reason for the outage.The American company has been contacted to provide an explanation for the disruption.ICERT, the government’s nodal cybersecurity body, will require Meta to submit the report. Business Today TV was informed by Meity sources that MeitY must follow protocol when there is any disruption to the internet in India’s geographical area. According to the sources, Meta has been requested to produce a report outlining the circumstances surrounding WhatsApp’s outage on Tuesday in India.
Around midday on Tuesday, WhatsApp had an outage that lasted for around two hours. The country was significantly affected by the outage. Text messages could not be sent or received by users. Even WhatsApp voice and video calls were not working. During these two hours, the Status function stopped working along with other essential services like WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp Pay.Meta withheld any significant information regarding the outage until after the services had been restored. The tech company said that a technical fault on their end was to blame for the downtime. They said in a statement to Business Today, “The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved.”
