WhatsApp is down in Oman and across the world

Muscat: Popular messaging app WhatsApp stopped working less than an hour before the bells of midnight signified New Year's Day for many across the world.

Millions of people around the globe who had messaged loved ones New Year greetings were left staring at their phones.

The service crashed across the globe with users taking to Facebook and Twitter to bemoan the loss of messages on one of the most important nights of the year for keeping in touch.

A twitter hashtag, #whatsappdown, asked people to retweet if they had come to Twitter to check the status of Whatsapp. In the space of a few minutes the hashtag had over 100,000 retweets.

There has been no status update from the company, but it is not the first time the service has crashed during periods of peak demand. One Twitter user said: "WhatsApp is down - what perfect timing."

According to global tech analysis site Down Detector the outage is mostly being felt by customers in Europe, Spain, India, Brazil and the United States. Whatsapp is the most popular message service in the world after Facebook messenger.

In Oman, network service providers have already escalated the issue to their technical services teams