India sure loves WhatsApp: 14 billion messages sent on New Year's Eve
Whether you're in a fish market in India, or in a classroom, or on a bus, one thing that truly captures the zeitgeist of the country is the constant buzzing "ping! ping! ping!" WhatsApp notifications you hear everywhere. On the last day of 2016, Indians outdid themselves on those notifications.
Indians sent 14 billion messages on New Year’s Eve using WhatsApp, Facebook said Friday, adding that this was higher than the previous record the company had in the country.
On Oct. 30, the day India celebrated the festival Diwali, more than 8 billion messages were exchanged using the service.
Of the 14 billion messages Indians exchanges on New Year's Eve, 32% were media files — 3.1 billion images, 700 million GIF animated files, and over 610 million videos, the company said.
To put the number into perspective, the social juggernaut said last October that its Messenger and WhatsApp services were used worldwide to send 60 billion messages each day. For further comparison, around 20 billion SMSs are sent in a day, according to the best estimates we have.
Facebook has over 700 million monthly active users, whereas as of last February, WhatsApp had 1 billion monthly active users. Many users, of course, use both services.
Coming back to India, WhatsApp continues its push into every smartphone users' lives. As of November last year, WhatsApp had 160 million monthly active users in the country. India has about 260 million smartphone users as of November 2016, according to research firm CounterPoint.
