Instant messaging client WhatsApp never ceases to remain outside the spotlight. Weeks after being in the headlines for becoming the most expensive acquisition by Facebook , the service is busy creating new records by breaking its own.
In a recent tweet from WhatsApp’s official Twitter account, the company claims to have handled a staggering 64 billion messages on a single day. The tweet claims that WhatsApp users recently sent 20 billion outgoing and 44 billion incoming messages during a 24 hour period. This easily beats a previous record set by them back in January when WhatsApp junkies sent 50 billion messages in a day. Back then too, WhatsApp had tweeted about the achievement. This is what the latest tweet says;
new daily record: 20B messages sent (inbound) and 44B messages received (outbound) by our users = 64B messages handled in just 24 hours.
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) April 2, 2014
Last year in June, WhatsApp had similarly announced that its users collectively sent over 27 billion messages a day. In less than a year, WhatsApp has more than doubled that figure. Its active user base has also crossed the 450 million mark recently.
At this point, if you are wondering why the numbers from WhatsApp have such a huge discrepancy between the number of sent and received messages, here’s the explanation. Surely, the number of messages received should be obviously lesser than the number of messages sent, right? The answer lies in the fact that on WhatsApp, one message can be received by multiple recipients thereby taking the number of incoming messages way higher than the number of messages sent.
After Facebook’s famous $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, questions were raised regarding the privacy of users on the platform with the terms of service on Facebook clashing with that of WhatsApp’s. However, WhatsApp clarified its stance with the help of a blog post . Meanwhile the service also suffered a major outage days after the announcement of the deal following which apps like Telegram and Viber gained a large number of users at WhatsApp’s expense.
All these setbacks notwithstanding, WhatsApp seems to be in no mood to slow down. With it recently adding privacy centric features like the addition of the option to control an users’ “Last seen” status, many critics have toned down their criticism about the service.
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