WhatsApp users broke the single-day record for voice and video calls made on the platform, according to Facebook. Although this is unlikely to be that surprising, considering the current climate and the unprecedented need for interactions between friends and family members to take place over the internet, it does also highlight the infrastructure and system improvements that have taken place throughout the year.
2020 was anything but a typical year with the COVID-19 pandemic alone having a significant impact on many industries, including technology. As businesses were forced to work remotely, relying on communication and workflow apps to operate, friends and family found their best option to stay in touch throughout the year was social media, messaging and video call apps. As a result, WhatsApp, Zoom, and many other services found themselves in higher demand than ever before.
Now that 2020 is done, Facebook has released some new information on how users of its various apps and services closed out the year and rang in 2021. Most notably, confirming more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls took place on New Year’s Eve 2020. Globally, this represented “the most ever calls in a single day on WhatsApp,” according to Facebook. Besides WhatsApp, Facebook also saw surges in group calls and live broadcasts.
Although Facebook had its own difficulties in 2020, with issues ranging from how it moderates content to its Instagram and WhatsApp purchases, the company was also one of the big winners in terms of usage. Besides seeing WhatsApp calling increasing year-over-year by 50-percent on New Year’s Eve, Facebook Messenger also saw double the number of group video calls taking place on the same day. Likewise, its self-broadcasting features also performed higher than usual, thanks to more than 55 million Instagram Live and Facebook Live broadcasts happening on New Year’s Eve.
While it is hardly surprising that the various stay-at-home and lockdown orders resulted in unusual spikes, it also highlights how much the technology has evolved in general, and in such a short space of time. Services like WhatsApp might not have been prepared for record-breaking levels of usage prior to the pandemic, but that all changed in 2020. For example, the Facebook announcement explained how during “the early days of the pandemic,” traffic spiked higher than what the usual New Year’s Eve would typically generate. Considering the last day of December was previously viewed as the busiest time of the year for these services, 2020 resulted in many New Year's Eve-like days, with the most recent NYE simply topping off an unprecedented year for WhatsApp and the rest of the Facebook services family.
Source: Facebook
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