In what appears to be a global outage, WhatsApp users around the world have been witnessing glitches in the instant messaging app’s privacy control settings. Users are taking to social media to report their failure to update their privacy settings. “Failed to update privacy settings, please try again later,” is the error message you get currently when you head over to your WhatsApp account’s privacy settings. WhatsApp is yet to confirm or deny the issue.
The main problem seems to be with one specific aspect of WhatsApp’s privacy settings, that is, last seen. WhatsApp seems to have automatically defaulted to “nobody” for last seen which is a setting that you turn on when you want to keep your online status private. This also means, you can’t know or see when others are online. With WhatsApp last seen defaulting to nobody, which seems to be a common issue in this outage, users are unable to see when others are online. Even if one tries to manually change this, the setting defaults back to nobody, before showing an error message again.
All the other privacy settings, including profile photo and status seem to be working just fine. Issues are being reported across both Android and iOS, and according to Down Detector, it’s happening across the US, UK, Europe, and parts of Asia including India. Some users are also reporting about connection issues and failure to log in to the app as well.
WhatsApp outages aren’t new or surprising, but this one seems to be a long one, and the instant messaging service owned by Facebook has still not owned up to it, which is surprising. Since the outage specifically involves the app’s privacy tabs, it could mean some sort of server-side update is in the works as we speak. We will update this piece as and when we have more clarity.
