Facebook-owned WhatsApp today announced that people sent 63 billion messages on New Year’s Eve, setting a new record for the app that lets people have chats and make voice and video calls.
Within those 63 billion messages, there were 7.9 billion images and 2.4 billion videos, a WhatsApp spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2146435,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"bots,business,social,","session":"D"}']For the sake of comparison, Messenger and WhatsApp combined were sending 60 billion messages per day, Facebook cofounder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the company’s F8 developer conference in April, as the Verge reported.
In January 2015, WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum said that people were sending 30 billion messages per day on WhatsApp. By February 2016, that number was 42 billion.
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People were sending 15 billion messages per day on Telegram as of February 2016. And in 2014, people were sending 40 billion iMessages per day, according to Bloomberg.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, and WhatsApp now has more than 1 billion monthly active users. In April, WhatsApp enabled WhatsApp end-to-end encryption by default.
The SMS message protocol was at one point handling 20 billion messages per day, Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans wrote in a 2015 blog post.
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