2018 has just started and it seems that WhatsApp, the most popular instant messaging service in the world, is not having a good start. After facing a global outage on New Year’s Eve and the discovery of a critical flaw which allowed hackers to infiltrate group chats without seeking permission from an admin, the service has stopped working for many users in India.
As reported by many users on Twitter, WhatsApp has stopped working on their devices with the app telling them to update to a newer version if they want to keep using the service.
However, the most frustrating thing about this ordeal is the fact that users are finding that there’s no update available in the Play Store. Some users even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but that too didn’t solve the problem.
Although the problem is being reported for at least a week or so, it really spread at midnight, January 12, when a higher number of users started reporting this problem. As per reports, most of the users who are reporting this problem are using Xiaomi devices. This is not the first problem that Xiaomi devices have faced in this past as the company is currently also trying to solve the problem of mismatched contacts bug.
That said, we have multiple Xiaomi devices in our offices including Redmi Note 3, Redmi Note 4, and Xiaomi MiA1 and WhatsApp is still working perfectly on them. We have also heard that WhatsApp is not working only on those devices on which the application came pre-installed i.e you didn’t have to download the app separately. However, we have still not been able to verify this claim.
When asked to respond by Techcook.com, WhatsApp released a statement in which the company said that,
“On background, this is an issue that’s being fixed. It was a problem with how our app is distributed, which is not under our control.”
The company’s vague statement does not tell affected users anything about a fix. It will be great if the company releases a fix for this problem instead of blaming OEMs.
