Users of 3rd-party WhatsApp clients reportedly being banned from the service for 24 hours

WhatsApp is one of the most-used messaging apps in existence, and today countless users of the service have taken to Google+ and Twitter to report that they’re being banned from the service for 24 hours. The common denominator between those reporting the ban seems to be the use of third-party WhatsApp clients on Android, specifically a popular one called WhatsApp+.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has only one official client available, but there have long been a variety of third-party clients available through non-official means. Some of these are fairly popular, like WhatsApp+, which has a community on Google+ of more than 700,000 members. Users of other clients, like WhatsAppMD, are also reporting that they’ve been banned from the messaging app for 24 hours.

WhatsApp has posted an article on their FAQ website in an attempt to clear up why this is happening, but it doesn’t do much more than recommend that users uninstall the third-party client and reinstall the official one. The company is apparently cracking down on this as a breach of the terms of service, and is justifying their actions under the premise of protecting user safety.

WhatsApp Plus is an application that was not developed by WhatsApp, nor is it authorized by WhatsApp. The developers of WhatsApp Plus have no relationship to WhatsApp, and we do not support WhatsApp Plus. Please be aware that WhatsApp Plus contains source code which WhatsApp cannot guarantee as safe and that your private information is potentially being passed to 3rd parties without your knowledge or authorization.

Please uninstall your application and install an authorized version of WhatsApp from ourwebsite or Google Play. Then, you will be able to use WhatsApp.

Dr. Mounib Al Rifai, the owner of the official WhatsApp+ Google+ community, had this to say:

Guys if you are getting this error don’t panic we are working hard to find a fix for the issue as soon as possible in the mean time you can use the normal whatsapp till a fix is found..

Very sorry for this issue as whatsapp is pushing us into a corner..

Update : for now reinstalling the normal whatsapp won’t get you unbanned till you finish the 24 hour ban..

Update 2 : if you didn’t get banned and are using whatsapp+ please uninstall it now and go back to normal whatsapp before you get banned till we find a fix

https://twitter.com/adamsaleem16/status/557606978772807680

So whatsapp just temporarily banned me. Smh pic.twitter.com/QBHMQLEKhm

— Leon (@Gichana_) January 20, 2015

https://twitter.com/DarwinTunechi/status/557629205585100802

Updating…