MeitY Seeks Meta’s Report On WhatsApp’s Longest-Ever Outage

Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp has come under the government scanner once again after the messaging app faced a global outage on Tuesday for almost two hours.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has reportedly asked tech giant Meta to submit a report on the outage of WhatsApp, which was one of the longest outages in history.

The ministry has asked the messaging platform to submit its report to its nodal agency Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), according to an HT report.

“Whenever there is an outage, the ministry seeks a report from the company involved, in this case Meta. An explanation has been sought for the same,” an official informed the publication.

On Tuesday, WhatsApp suffered a partial or total outage, globally. While the outage started getting reported from about 12:33 PM IST, the number of reports crossed 11,000 by 12:48 PM IST and further increased to almost 30,000 by 1:00 PM IST.

The company later cited some technical error on its end as the reason behind this outage.

WhatsApp is one of the most widely used messaging applications in India. As of June 2021, WhatsApp had over 487 Mn users in India.

However, like other tech giants, WhatsApp has come under government scrutiny several times for various reasons pertaining to market compliance.

Currently, WhatsApp parent Meta is also under probe by the competition commission of India (CCI) — for WhatsApp’s 2021 policy update. Meta had recently challenged the competition watchdog for the same, at the Supreme Court. However, SC rejected its plea.

In its latest monthly compliance report, which the big techs need to file complying with the IT Rules, 2021, WhatsApp banned over 2.3 Mn accounts between August 1 and August 31.