WhatsApp, one of the world’s most-used messaging services, hit a new milestone on New Year’s Eve: more than 75 billion messages sent by its users. The new record represents the most messages sent in a single day in the chat app’s history, a spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. The previous record was set in 2016, also on New Year’s Eve: 63 billion messages sent.
The 75 billion number included 13 billion images and 5 billion videos, the Facebook-owned WhatsApp revealed. It may have also been driven by other WhatsApp features, like Status, a Snapchat-like story that disappears within 24 hours. Status made its debut in February 2017 and is currently used by 300 million daily active users. WhatsApp currently has 1.3 billion monthly active users.
The record was set despite an outage that occurred for roughly an hour in various parts of the world, a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email, though inactivity reports from users were seen for about two hours. According to the site DownDetector, the outage was heaviest in western Europe, but complaints of inactivity were heard in major cities around the world, from Mumbai to London to New York City. A similar outage was reported in western Europe on New Year’s Eve in 2015.
The record was also set despite the fact that WhatsApp discontinued Blackberry OS and Windows Phone services on December 31.
