Snapchat users in Ireland and further afield are facing technical difficulties as the popular messaging app has been out of action since early this morning.
Users have taken to social media to complain as they are unable to use any of its features such as sending pictures, videos and messages to other followers. Many are now concerned that they will lose their Streaks which track how many days in a row messages have been sent between friends.
Problems appear to have begun at around 7:30am with the outage still ongoing over three hours later. Online outage site Down Detector is currently showing some 9,000 reports of Snapchat having difficulties.
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In Ireland, reports of the app being down peaked at 8am with over 700 complaints on DownDetector. Hundreds more have followed in the intervening hours.
This 9,000 figure indicates it is a worldwide issue affecting thousands across the globe. No direct cause has been determined for the outage and Snapchat itself has not commented on the matter.
Snapchat devotees have now taken to Down Detector's forum page to complain about the problems with one fan, called Rae, saying: "Snaps won’t send, if it doesn’t fix bye-bye streak." Another person added: "I don’t want to lose my streak it’s nearly 4 years."
Social media sites, such as Twitter, are also being flooded with fans desperately trying to find out what is wrong. One tweet posted by Snapchat user Mishi said: "Snapchat down at 8am is this a joke." Whilst another fan named Misan added: "Why is Snapchat down? I can’t afford to lose my streaks."
The Snapchat Support page on Twitter is also unusually quiet but expect news to appear soon on a fix time.
Worried about your Snapchat Streak? Here's the latest advice from Snapchat
• To keep a Snapstreak going, both Snapchatters must send a Snap (not Chat) back and forth to each other within a 24-hour window.
• If you lost your Snapstreak and you know you’ve sent a Snap (not Chat) back and forth within the 24-hour window, please let Snapchat know via this link.
According to the most recent stats, as of the first quarter of this year, Snapchat had around 332 million daily users which is an increase of around 30 million from the year before.
Snapchat has just announced that it will soon be introducing new features to help keep conversations with friends fresh, fast, and easy to find.
One of the best new additions will be a Lock Screen Widget, available now with iOS 16, that will keep chats saved right on the iPhone's Lock Screen. With this new tool, users can also save themselves the scrolling when they want to start Snapping.
New Chat Shortcuts at the top of the chat tab are also being introduced to make it easy to do things like spot unread Snaps and Chats from friends, see missed calls, and reply to stories. Shortcuts will also remind users if they owe a reply and show them when birthdays are coming up.
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