While the entire world has been busy celebrating the New Year's Eve and wishing each other on this occasion, some users of a popular messaging app were not so lucky. Snapchat was down for many users ahead of the New Year's Eve as thousands of complaints confirmed an outage with the app.
According to Downdetector website, which monitors outages and real-time problems with online services, Snapchat users started experiencing problems with the app at around 11:50 p.m. BST. The outage seems to affect a wider geographic area, heavily impacting users in Europe, Australia and the US.
Snapchat down, users unhappy
Thousands of users complained about not being able to load stories, send snaps, messages or even open the app. Many users reported that they got nothing but a blank screen, even though the app was receiving notifications.
The issues with Snapchat appears to not have been fixed yet as Downdetector still shows areas affected by the outage. Users are furious about the fact that their favourite messaging app went down on an important occasion.
Snapchat users vented out their frustration on Twitter, which resulted in #Snapchatdown hashtag trending on New Year's Eve. This is certainly not the way Snapchat wanted to start a new year.
A fix underway?
Snapchat is still hasn't been fully restored to its normal function. But the company has acknowledged the problem and promised to deliver a fix. But it has been nearly 12 hours and there's no update from Snapchat on when the app will be fixed.
Not the first time
While it is common for social media apps to experience issues, Snapchat has been reporting several outages of late. According to Snapchat's official support handle on Twitter, there were documented instances of issues with the app in September, October and November. It's not clear what caused the outage this time, but it appears an overload on the servers as users tried to send snaps on NYE 2020 caused the app to malfunction.
As of this writing, there's no update on when Snapchat will start working normally. But it should be sooner than later.
