Record 75B WhatsApp messages sent on NYE

san francisco — Facebook-owned WhatsApp hit a new milestone on New Year’s Eve with more than 75 billion messages sent by its users globally. The number included 13 billion images and five billion videos. According to VentureBeat, the 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.

WhatsApp users in India sent a record over 20 billion messages to exchange greetings on New Year’s Eve. The messages were sent between 12am till 11.59pm on December 31.

WhatsApp registered these numbers despite the fact that users in India and other parts of the world went into a frenzy after the messaging platform went down at midnight on New Year. It was restored in two hours.

“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.

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.

More than 10 million people around the world also went live on Facebook to share their New Year’s Eve moments with their communities, the company has said. “The night topped last year’s live broadcast activity, with people sharing 47 per cent more live videos than last year,” Erin Connolly, Product Manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. —