WhatsApp suffers major outage

The WhatsApp logo on a smartphone in New York, on March 10, 2017. (Patrick Sison / AP)

WhatsApp suffered a serious outage on Tuesday, preventing users across the globe from sending or receiving messages on the platform.

The world's most popular messaging app started having problems around 3 a.m. ET. As of 4:50 a.m. the service was back for some users, but appeared to remain patchy elsewhere.

There were nearly 70,000 reports of outages on the platform, according to data from Down Detector, which tracks service disruptions around the world.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, the global tech giant formerly known as Facebook.

In a statement, a company spokesperson told CNN Business that it had resumed service.

"We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today," the representative said. "We've fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience."

In a post on Twitter, Down Detector said that user reports indicated that WhatsApp had been "having problems" since 3:17 a.m. ET.

WhatsApp is the world's top messaging app, with more than 2 billion users. As much as 31% of the global population uses it, according to a 2022 analysis by digital intelligence platform Similarweb.

Many users in India, WhatsApp's biggest market, posted on other social media that they had experienced problems communicating through the app. The country has a whopping 400 million WhatsApp users.

— CNN's Manveena Suri and Swati Gupta contributed to this report.