WhatsApp crashed, restored as India welcomed 2018

Users in India and other parts of the world went into a frenzy after WhatsApp went down puncturing their plans to wish their friends a "prosperous 2018" at the stroke of midnight. It was restored in two hours.

At midnight, a large spike was seen in the number of reports that the messaging service was suffering outages in India, Japan, Britain, Barbados, Panama, South Africa, Spain and Qatar, The Mirror reported.

According to downdetector.co.uk, it received 2,012 reports that WhatsApp was not working at its peak.

Thousands of people took to Twitter and other social media platforms to express anger, as well as connect with their dear ones, while the Facebook-owned instant messenger remained dormant for almost two hours on Sunday.

Several people used social media to vent their frustrations using the #whatsappdown.

One Twitter user wrote: "Nothing could've been better than whatsapp servers crashing on new year's eve #whatsappdown #WhatsApp"

Another said: "Open Whatsapp. Send message. Nothing. Airplane mode on. Airplane mode off. Nothing. Open twitter. See £whatsappDown. Find relief that it's not just me. #HappyNewYear2018."

The app appeared to display a permanent loading wheel with messages failing to deliver. Whatsapp later apologised.

"WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience," a spokeswoman for the messaging service was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, some smartphones could have experienced this problem due to WhatsApp cutting support for some operating systems.

Last week, the company confirmed that the mobile messaging app will stop working on a number of platforms from December 31.

The messaging app dropped the support for 'BlackBerry OS', 'BlackBerry 10', 'Windows Phone 8.0' and older platforms, from December 31.

"We will no longer actively develop for these platforms, some features may stop functioning at any time," WhatsApp had said at that time.