WhatsApp Sees Record Number of Users on New Year’s Eve

WhatsApp is one of the applications whose adoption increased during 2020 due to social distancing and people needing an efficient way to communicate even from the safety of their own homes, and the Facebook-owned company says a new record was set on New Year’s Eve.

No less than 1.4 billion voice and video calls were made on WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve globally, the company says, and this is an increase of no less than 50 percent versus the same period a year before when everything in the world was still normal.

Furthermore, Facebook says Instagram also recorded a huge spike on the same day. Facebook and Instagram together recorded more than 55 million live broadcasts on New Year’s Eve, according to official numbers.

People celebrating from the safety of their homes

“Before COVID-19, New Year’s Eve generated Facebook’s biggest spikes in messaging, photo uploads and social sharing at midnight across the world,” Caitlin Banford, technical program manager at Facebook, says.

“However, in March 2020, the early days of the pandemic produced traffic spikes that would dwarf New Year’s Eve several times over — and it lasted for months. Behind the scenes, Facebook Engineering came together to drive unprecedented efficiency improvements and make our infrastructure more resilient. This work includes load testing, disaster recovery testing and shuffling capacity. This year, New Year’s Eve looked a lot different, and we had engineering teams across Facebook’s apps, ready to support any issue, so the world could ring in 2021.”

Microsoft is one of the companies which confirmed a massive increase in global adoption, this time for Microsoft Teams, as the number of employees working from home skyrocketed last year due to obvious reasons. Microsoft Teams reached 115 million daily active users, up 50 percent in just six months, according to company data.