WhatsApp, the popular Facebook-owned messaging app with 1.2 billion monthly users, experienced an outage in many countries on 3 May spanning several hours.

“Earlier today, WhatsApp users in all parts of the world were unable to access WhatsApp for a few hours. We have now fixed the issue and apologise for the inconvenience,” the app maker said in a statement.

India, Canada, the US, UK and Brazil were some of the countries impacted by the outage, which affected all three versions of the app – iOS, Android and Windows.

In Brazil, WhatsApp was down for about two and a half hours and many switched to rival app Telegram, Reuters reported. Telegram previously gained millions of customers in the country after the government blocked WhatsApp on two occasions in the past.

In related news, Facebook announced WhatsApp’s new Status feature, a clone of Snapchat’s Stories offering, garnered more than 175 million daily active users, after launching in mid-February. In a short time, it managed to outstrip Snapchat’s daily active user figure, which stands at around 160 million.