By Lloyd Takawira
There was enrage and quisling whispers of exasperation after WhatsApp faced a technical glitch hiding the last seen, online and typing status of it’s users.
The platform had been flooded with reports from the social media platform users complaining about the problem.
As reported by the Daily Express in the UK, independent outage monitor Down Detector said it began seeing a huge spike in WhatsApp down reports Friday morning.
The Daily Express qouated the Down Detector saying “We registered a peak of almost 4,000 WhatsApp down reports after users started experiencing problems after 4pm BST.
Out of those affected, 74 per cent were having problems with the WhatsApp last seen feature while 21 per cent were experiencing connection issues.”
WhatsApp users across the globe took to Twitter and Facebook to report the issue, saying they were unable to change their last seen settings in the app’s privacy settings as well as not able to see others last seen.
One Twitter user posted: “Has anyone else’s ‘last seen’ on WhatsApp been automatically turned off and can’t turn it back on?!”
While another posted: “Does anyone know what’s going on with #whatsapp ? ‘Last seen’ suddenly says nobody and I haven’t changed it.”
And one added: “Why would Whatsapp remove last seen, online and typing feature”.
However for ZIMBABWEANS the story with most reporting that they never saw it ,while some progressed ignorance over the narrative saying it was a “whatsApp hoax”.
Speaking to BustopTV, IT expert , Remigios “Remi” Chilimanzi who operates in the Harare Central Business District said, ” the disappearance of the last seen status in WhatsApp also meant the online and typing alerts also weren’t showing. It’s true my WhatsApp was not showing all those features, but it was not for long, I’m sure they quickly rectified that.”
Blessed Muchuwa, who spoke to BustopTV said, “I only heard about that on Twitter, since then, it appears that the problem with WhatsApp has been resolved with Down Detector reports of issues with the chat app falling sharply.”
