Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp on Friday faced an outage with millions of users in India and abroad reporting issues with updating privacy settings.

Users were unable to see online and last seen status of other users. Some users were even facing issues with seeing ‘blue ticks’ indicating that a message has been read by the receiver.

The issue was fixed after hours. Users can now access all privacy features including last seen and online status.

Many users had taken to Twitter on Friday evening reporting issues with WhatsApp. The platform began trending on the microblogging platform within hours. Outage monitor website Down Detector had reported a 66 per cent spike in the reports of WhatsApp going down.

“WhatsApp is experiencing serious issues with last seen at, online status and registration!” WABetaInfo had tweeted.

The issues had been caused by a server-side outage according to the news website.

“WhatsApp is experiencing today serious issues for all their platforms. The issue is server-side, so we have to wait for a remote fix,” it further said.

Meanwhile, speculations regarding the issues began circulating on social media with many claiming that the platform was working on a new feature to hide the online and last seen status. WABetaInfo later clarified that it was simply a server issue and that WhatsApp is not working on any such features.

“A lot of users are sharing some tweets on Twitter, reporting that WhatsApp is experimenting new features like hiding the last seen, the online status, and soon WhatsApp will disable the read receipt: IT’S FAKE!” WABeta reported.

“These are not new WhatsApp features but it’s caused by a general outage or server-side bug worldwide,” it added.

WhatsApp had later fixed all issues including last seen and online status.

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