WhatsApp has broken, with users unable to send or receive messages.

The world’s most popular messaging app appears to have stopped working, potentially affecting billions of users.

The app would allow people to type messages to friends and then press send. But they then became stuck, never actually delivering.

The issues led to a huge spike of reports on outage tracking website DownDetector, with users around the world reporting problems.

The issues appeared to begin around 8am UK time.

WhatsApp does not maintain any official outlets to update users on outages. Unlike the rest of Meta, it does not run an official status page, and it has a Twitter account intended to document problems but has not used it since 2014.

It also runs official Facebook and Twitter accounts, but neither had been updated in response to the outage.

WhatsApp is the biggest chat platform in the world, with more than two billion monthly active users, and the third biggest social platform after Facebook and YouTube.