According to reports, the government has written to Meta India asking for the reasons behind the almost two-hour WhatsApp outage.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) wants to know if the disruption of the instant messaging platform was due to an internal glitch or a cyberattack.

The IT ministry has also asked WhatsApp to coordinate with 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.

The government says, “We have asked them if the outage was due to internal factors or some external cyberattack. They will respond with the relevant details in a few days.”

Users weren’t able to send or receive text and video messages for almost two hours on Tuesday. After the service was restored, a spokesperson for Meta it had fixed the issue that had caused the outage and it apologized for the inconvenience caused to users.

WhatsApp confirmed that its services had suffered an outage, but the company did not offer any explanation as to why the app was out of service globally.

WhatsApp Web, used by many on their desktops and laptops, was also hit by the outage. Other features of the app such as WhatsApp Pay were also down. The instant messaging app has more than 500 million users in India and has become ubiquitous in the country.

It’s the second time in less than a year that Meta’s services have suffered a global blackout. In October 2021, all the three of its social media platforms-Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp- had suffered a nearly seven-hour outage, was caused due to configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic among the different Meta data centers.