People are freaking out that messaging service WhatsApp is down

Associated Press

Messaging service WhatsApp went down worldwide on Wednesday afternoon. 

"WhatsApp is aware of the issue and working to fix it as soon as possible," a WhatsApp person told Business Insider in an email. 

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The Facebook-owned messaging app stopped working sometime around 4:50 PM EST, and as of 5:54 PM EST on Wednesday, service had not yet been restored to WhatsApp users.  

The outage occurred just as Facebook's senior management was on a quarterly earnings conference call with Wall Street analysts and investors, but it went unmentioned. 

WhatsApp users immediately took to Twitter to voice their frustrations: