WhatsApp now has more than 250 million monthly active users, the messaging service revealed to The Wall Street Journal.
This puts WhatsApp in the same league as services like LinkedIn, which has more than 225 million members, and Twitter, which passed 200 million active users in December -- though there are likely many more inactive accounts on top of that.
WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, lets users send messages for free across all major smartphone platforms. Earlier this month, WhatsApp revealed that it hit a new daily record in terms of messages sent through the platform:
new daily record: 10B+ msgs sent (inbound) and 17B+ msgs received (outbound) by our users = 27 Billion msgs handled in just 24 hours!— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) June 12, 2013
Google and Facebook were both rumored to have considered acquiring the startup for around $1 billion, but the company's CEO has firmly denied any interest in selling.