WhatsApp services were restored following a nearly two-hour-long global outage on Tuesday that left users from the UK to India complaining about not being able to send or receive text and video messages.

Meta, which owns the popular messaging app, said it has fixed the outage — dubbed as one of its longest — and the service was back.

“The brief outage was a result of a technical error on our part and has now been resolved,” a Meta company spokesperson said. It did not offer any further details.

According to Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, the messaging app was not working for many users across multiple regions.WhatsApp Web, the app’s web version, used by many on their desktops and laptops, was also hit by the outage.

“We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today (Tuesday). We’ve fixed the issue and apologise for any inconvenience,” a Meta company spokesperson said. Meta, previously known as Facebook, bought WhatsApp in 2014.

The outage led to Twitterati taking a dig at WhatsApp, with hilarious memes. The hashtag WhatsApp down was trending on Twitter.

According to Downdetector, WhatsApp faced problems since 3:17am Eastern Time(12:47pm). Users in Asia, the UK, South Africa and Europe experienced the issue while sending and receiving texts and videos.

This is WhatsApp’s first major outage since October 5,2021, when a snag took down WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook together, affecting millions of users for several hours before services were restored.

Meanwhile, telecom operators’ association COAI has made a strong pitch for “same service, same rules” with regard to OTT communication services, arguing that a level playing field needs to be maintained for all technologies.