More than 100 billion WhatsApp messages sent on New Year’s Eve, says service
The messaging platform said December 31 2019 was its busiest day ever.
More than 100 billion messages were sent using WhatsApp leading up to midnight on New Year’s Eve, the messaging service has said.
The Facebook-owned platform said the figure was a record number of communications to be sent in a single day in the firm’s 10-year history.
In the UK, more than 900 million messages were sent on December 31 using WhatsApp.
According to the company’s figures, more than 12 billion of the total messages sent globally were picture messages.
The communications service, which has more than 1.5 billion active users, was bought by Facebook in 2014 for around 19 billion dollars (£14.5 billion).
It had risen to prominence because of its encryption-based system which means messages cannot be intercepted or seen by others, including the company itself.
Alongside the New Year’s Eve data, WhatsApp published figures on the most popular features of the app over the last 12 months.
Text messaging was the most common use of the service, ahead of status updates – which work in the same fashion as Instagram or Snapchat stories as a collection of photos and videos which disappear after 24 hours.
Picture messaging was the third most common feature used, followed by making calls and voice notes.
