WhatsApp, Facebook-owned popular instant messaging app, is now delivering approximately 100 billion messages a day, the company’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the quarterly earnings call Thursday.
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For some perspective, users exchanged 100 billion messages on WhatsApp on New Year’s Eve last year. That is the day when WhatsApp tops its engagement figures, also the time when the service customarily suffered glitches in the past years. (No outage on last New Year’s Eve!)
At this point, WhatsApp is only competing with itself. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp were simultaneously used to exchange 60 billion messages a day early 2016. Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned in May that iMessage and FaceTime were seeing record usage, but did not share specific figures. The last time Apple did share the figure, it was far behind WhatsApp’s then usage (podcast). WeChat, which has also received over 1 billion users, is behind in daily volume of messages, too.
Early 2014, WhatsApp was being used to exchange about 50 billion texts a day, its then chief executive Jan Koum revealed at an event.
At the time, WhatsApp had fewer than 500 million users. WhatsApp now has more than 2 billion users and has the largest market by users, at least in India, with its popularity exceeding that of every other smartphone app, including the big blue app.
“This year we’ve all relied on messaging more than ever to keep up with our loved ones and get business done,” tweeted Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp.
Sadly, that’s all the update the company shared on WhatsApp today. Mystery continues for when WhatsApp expects to resume its payments service in Brazil, and when it plans to launch its payments in India, where it began testing the service in 2018.(It has already shared big plans around financial services in India.)
“We are proud that WhatsApp is able to deliver roughly 100B messages every day and we’re excited about the road ahead,” Cathcart said.
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