Snapchat down: App not working as users unable to send snaps and load messages

Snapchat has stopped working, with users unable to send snaps, according to a huge number of reports.

Thousands of people reported issues with the app, according to tracking website Downdetector.

It led to a flurry of people rushing to Twitter to check that it was down for everyone and not just them – and the outage does appear to be affecting users en masse.

Issues were particularly focused in western Europe and the east coast of the US, according to Downdetector. That may simply be a consequence of the fact that time zones mean people in those regions are most likely to be sending messages at this time.

Not every user appeared to be affected by the problems, with some reporting that they could send messages. It was not clear what decided whether those snaps would send, or if there is any way of fixing the problems.

The outage comes just a few days after another major issue with the app, which stopped the feed working for a number of users.

This summer, Snapchat went down as part of a problem with many parts of the internet, when some of the world's biggest apps – such as Discord and many Google apps, along with Snapchat – went offline. That was traced back to a problem with Google's services, which power many other apps and therefore can cause chaos across the web when they are hit by problems.

Snapchat has hundreds of millions of monthly users, who create billions of snaps each day. That means that even the shortest outage can lead to considerable outrage among users who are unable to get on the app.