**WhatsApp** glitch breaks photo and video sharing while texts keep working

WhatsApp users in multiple countries ran into a selective disruption early Monday that blocked sending and uploading photos, videos, stickers, GIFs and other attachments, while plain text chats continued to work for many people. Reports came from India, the UK, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Colombia, pointing to a broader service issue rather than a problem isolated to one market. WhatsApp had not publicly explained the cause at publication time, and it was not clear whether the problem had been fully resolved.

Media uploads stall while WhatsApp text chats keep moving

The most visible failure was in WhatsApp's media flow, not in the app as a whole. Affected users described uploads that stalled partway through, sat on loading prompts, or returned retry messages when they tried to send photos, videos, stickers, GIFs and other files. That distinction matters for anyone using WhatsApp operationally: a conversation could appear active because text still moved, even while image, video and document sharing quietly failed.

This was not a full app-wide shutdown based on the available reports. Many users could still exchange regular text messages, which made the issue easier to mistake for a local connection problem or a single broken attachment. In practice, that meant customer support teams, sales operators and field staff could keep chatting but still get blocked on the parts of the workflow that depend on proof-of-work photos, product videos, screenshots or other media.

Complaints spread beyond one market as reports spike Monday morning

The disruption showed up across at least eight countries: India, the UK, France, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain and Colombia. That cross-market spread is an important baseline, because it suggests users were not dealing with one carrier problem, one national outage or one regional app-store issue. For teams that run WhatsApp across geographies, the reports pointed to a platform-level problem affecting the media pipeline more than the chat layer.

Downdetector also showed an early-Monday surge in complaints, with one account of the outage noting a peak around 11 a.m. That is useful as a timing signal, not a full measure of impact. The exact scale of the disruption remained unclear, but the spike lined up with the pattern users were describing: not total loss of service, but repeated failure when trying to upload or send media.

Troubleshooting steps did not clear the problem for every user

Users tried the usual fixes associated with flaky messaging behavior, including restarting the phone, switching between Wi‑Fi and mobile data, and reinstalling the app. Those steps did not resolve the issue for all affected users, which further points away from a simple device-side or network-side problem. If media still would not send after those checks, the safer assumption was that the failure sat with WhatsApp's service rather than with a single handset or connection.

For business users, the practical takeaway is straightforward: if a WhatsApp thread is active but files are hanging, treat text delivery and media delivery as separate checks. A sent message does not guarantee a photo, video or sticker has gone through. Until WhatsApp provides a public explanation, the key unknowns are how large the disruption was and whether all affected users have recovered, so teams that depend on media sharing may need a fallback channel for time-sensitive files.

Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI. Images are for illustrative purposes only.