UPDATE (Aug 19, 2017 at 9.54pm CST): WhatsApp appears to be working normally again for some users in Chinese mainland Others are still reporting sporadic access issues.
WhatsApp is again experiencing service issues inside Chinese mainland, with users in the country reporting problems viewing, sending and receiving images and videos, as well as audio messages.
Difficulties with the app allegedly surfaced last night.
This latest lapse in functionality comes a month after the service experienced similar issues in China, affecting video and voice calls and, for some users, the ability to send images, videos and even text-based messages. The whole ordeal lasted just a day.
The company’s website also went down in China during the last outage, something that appears to be an issue this time around (if you aren’t using a VPN).
WhatsApp’s webpage as of 2.45pm today, without a VPN
It appears service issues vary, with some users reporting being unable to connect to the app at all, while others have only experienced issues with photos, videos and audio.
A multi-platform messaging service, WhatsApp is owned by Internet heavyweight Facebook and is the company’s last active service in China.
There has been some speculation that the app may be facing a Gmail-style takedown. Even after the main Google site was blocked, Gmail remained accessible until around December 2014 – but with bandwidth throttled, meaning slow connections that pushed users to migrate to other mail services.
It was also hypothesized last month that WhatsApp’s service issues may be related to Facebook’s decision to transfer the messaging program from IBM cloud servers to its own data center. No shortage of WeChat users have again forwarded this theory in relation to the recent service issues.
Additional reporting by Sky Gidge.
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