WhatsApp users sent over a record-breaking 75 billion messages worldwide to exchange greetings on New Year's Eve, the Facebook-owned company said on Thursday (January 4). Among them, 13 billion messages were image-based and 5 billion were videos. In India alone, the 200 million monthly active users on WhatsApp sent over 20 billion messages on New Year’s Eve.
WhatsApp says this is the highest-ever user activity on a single day. The platform has over 1 billion users worldwide.
The messages were sent between 12 am till 11.59 pm IST on December 31.
"New Year's Eve was WhatsApp's biggest messaging day ever, closing out a successful year for the company that included the introduction of several new features," WhatsApp said in a statement.
Interestingly, WhatsApp suffered an outage that lasted more than an hour late on December 31, 2017, and in the early hours from January 1, 2018. Users in India and other parts of the world went into a frenzy after the messaging platform went down. It was though restored in two hours.
According to downdetector.co.uk, it received 2,012 reports that WhatsApp was not working at its peak.
More than 10 million people around the world went live on Facebook to share their New Years Eve moments with their communities. “The night topped last year’s live broadcast activity, with people sharing 47 percent more live videos than last year,” Erin Connolly, Product Manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
According to VentureBeat, WhatsApp’s new record represents the most messages sent in a single day in the chat app’s history. The previous record was set in 2016, also on New Year’s Eve, with 63 billion messages sent.
The top five popular features of WhatsApp included video calling, live location, delete for everyone (messages), new album view for photos and "Status" which saw over 300 million daily active users.
