Network router causes WhatsApp's 'biggest' outage

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum has issued an apology and blamed a network router for the recent outage of the mobile messaging app.

The instant messaging app was down for more than three hours on Saturday (February 22), just days after Facebook Inc bought it for $19 billion.

"We are sorry about the downtime," Koum wrote on Sunday. "It has been our longest and biggest outage in years. It was caused by a network router fault which cascaded into our servers. We worked with our service provider on resolving the issue and making sure it will not happen again."

The five-year old company currently has about 450 million users worldwide and is the leading smartphone-based messaging app.

(Reuters)