WhatsApp With 100 Billion Messages A Day: Twice The Number It Had In 2014

30/10/2020

WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging app based on the number of users. And this time, it has surpassed roughly 100 billion messages daily.

That was mentioned by Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, at the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Facebook that acquired WhatsApp in 2014, saw that number during the New Year's Eve of 2020.

That day is the day WhatsApp tops its engagement numbers.

Peaking at that massive amount of messages processed per day, WhatsApp is literally competing only against itself.

Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, confirmed Zuckerberg's saying and tweeted that:

"This year we've all relied on messaging more than ever to keep up with our loved ones and get business done. We are proud that @WhatsApp is able to deliver roughly 100B messages every day and we're excited about the road ahead."

In comparison, WhatsApp was exchanging around 50 billion messages per day back in 2014, that according to its co-founder Jan Koum in an event. In 2016, Whatsapp was delivering 60 billion messages per day.

During those time, WhatsApp had around 500 million users. This time, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users.

Facebook's own messaging app, Facebook Messenger, only processed around 8 billion messages per day as of May 2018. Competitor iMessage and FaceTime from Apple also see a record usage, but CEO Tim Cook in May declined to share specific figures.

The last time Apple did share the figures, the two products from Apple were far behind WhatsApp’s then usage.

The news highlight how messaging has become an integral part in the society.

With that level of information exchange, it's clear that communication is key for almost everything. From simple tasks of asking someone personally, to business-related importance to even governmental needs, messaging apps connect distant people together in an instant.

And this is exceptionally true during the 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic that prevented many people from meeting each other as often.

The ubiquitous WhatsApp is again showing how far it is leading the pack.

However, with that many information exchanged per day, curbing the spread of disinformation is becoming an even more important task.

WhatsApp has been cracking on down on it through various ways. But its end-to-end encryption that is meant to prevent others other than the sender and the recipient to read messages, that is also holding WhatsApp from doing the prevention to the fullest.

It's worth noting that during that New Year's Eve, the time when WhatsApp was delivering its peak number of messages, the messaging app was struggling for a brief of time.