[imagesource: Getty Images]

UPDATED: It’s back, everyone, although some messages appear to be a little glitchy. You may resume sending obscenely long voicenotes.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

As things stand at the time of writing, WhatsApp is down and users are unable to send or receive messages.

The Independent reports that the world’s most popular messaging app appears to have stopped working, which is affecting billions of users in various parts of the world:

There did not appear to be any fix for the issue, with restarting the app or using the web version also failing to work…

The issues led to a huge spike of reports on outage tracking website DownDetector, with users around the world reporting problems.

Reports started flooding in at around 9AM South African time.

At first, sent messages received the ‘single tick’ but we’re now at the full ‘clock’ stage.

It’s still unclear what has caused the outage and there’s no guarantee that messages sent since WhatsApp went down will deliver when things are back up and running.

WaBetaInfo reports that the issue is “server-side” which means it won’t be fixed until Meta resolves it remotely.

Meta, which owns WhatsApp, issued a statement earlier:

 “We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible.”

Time to fire up the old SMS system.

Who would have thought those useless SMS bundles that come with the average phone contract would once again prove useful?

[sources:independent]