WhatsUp with WhatsApp?

A matter of days after its US$16 billion acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp suffered a three-hour outage on Saturday, sending the Twittersphere into meltdown.

The popular mobile messaging app, used by over 450 million users worldwide, experienced “server issues” over the weekend, revealing to its one million strong social media following:

“Sorry we currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly.”

The global outage led to speculation of foul play from new owners Facebook, allegedly desperate to convert users to its Facebook Chat service.

With this theory quickly discredited however, many other users took to Twitter to offer a more philosophical approach to the downtime, with one @Iamhollybrown

"Can't believe all these people are crying about Whatsapp not working, do some exercise, do some work, learn a language."

But following three-hour of social media madness, the five-year-old app solved the problem, tweeting:

WhatsApp service has been restored. We are so sorry for the downtime...

— WhatsApp Status (@wa_status) February 22, 2014