OVER 1.4 BILLION VIDEO AND VOICE CALLS WERE MADE VIA WHATSAPP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE

Sun 03 January 2021:

Facebook has revealed that WhatsApp witnessed 50 percent increase in video and voice calling on New Year’s eve 2020 in comparison to last year. WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps all over the world and the service lets you conveniently make calls for free without any time restriction.

As many people were staying indoors due to coronavirus pandemic, a lot of them used WhatsApp to make calls during New Year Eve.

As per the stats shared by Facebook, more than 1.4 billion video and voice calls were made globally on New Year’s eve. The social media giant also witnessed more than 55 million live broadcasts globally across Facebook and Instagram during the occasion.

“Before Covid-19, New Year’s Eve generated Facebook’s biggest spikes in messaging, photo uploads and social sharing at midnight across the world.

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,” Caitlin Banford, Technical Programme Manager at Facebook, said in a statement.

“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.”

People celebrated with effects in Messenger, and the top AR (augmented reality) effect in the US was “2020 Fireworks.”

Facebook said that New Year’s Eve 2020 was the biggest day ever for Messenger group video calls (3+ people) in the US, with nearly 2X more group video calls on the day compared to the average day.

The company didn’t reveal the stats of how many messages were exchanged on the occasion. Last year, over 100 billion messages were sent globally on WhatsApp on December 31, 2019, as per Facebook.