Yes, the company that owns WhatsApp, Meta, has released a statement saying "We're aware that some customers are now having problems sending messages and we're working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible." Facebook is also owned by Meta.
It appears to be a larger outage. Although WhatsApp has not released any official statements, users from Indonesia, Kenya, and certain Spanish-speaking countries, besides Indians, are complaining about issues with the messaging service. The hashtag #whatsappdown is trending on Twitter.
Following a significant DNS failure in October 2021, Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were unavailable for around six hours. The service known as DNS, or Domain Name System, converts human-readable hostnames like indianexpress.com into unformatted, numeric IP addresses.
Your computer won't be able to connect to the servers hosting the website you're looking for if DNS isn't functioning properly. But in this instance, BGP routing was the cause of the issue. The mechanism that aids one network in determining the optimal path to another network is known as BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol.
Earlier in March 2021, WhatsApp was down for around 45 minutes. Meta blamed "a technical issue" for the outage, which "caused individuals to have trouble accessing several Facebook services," but didn't provide any further details.
Four significant WhatsApp outages occurred in 2020, with the most significant one occurring in January and lasting almost three hours. After that, there was one in April, one for two hours in July, and one for only a few minutes in August 2020.