What's the news: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has written to Meta asking for the reasons behind WhatsApp's recent outage, Economic Times reports. The popular messaging platform was not working for users across the globe for nearly 2 hours on October 25. Was it a cyberattack: The government wants to know if the outage was due to an internal glitch or a cyberattack, the report stated. If it was the latter, the government has asked Meta to coordinate with the country's cybersecurity watchdog, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) "to ascertain whether there was any untoward cyber incident with regard to the company’s servers during the time." Notably, CERT-In's new cybersecurity rules already require all companies to report cybersecurity incidents within 6 hours. Why does this matter: Although rare, WhatsApp outages have significant implications because of the number of people that rely on it not just for personal communication but for running their businesses. In India, over 500 million users are on WhatsApp. Also, the applicability of CERT-in's controversial guidelines here is interesting. What has WhatsApp said so far: The company is yet to explain what went wrong but a WhatsApp spokesperson told news outlets: “We know people had trouble sending messages on WhatsApp today. We’ve fixed the issue and apologize for any inconvenience." WhatsApp outage last year: Last year, a massive outage took down all of Facebook's services including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger for 6 hours. Facebook at the time attributed the outage to a configuration change to its routers. Also Read Here’s Why Facebook,…
