WhatsApp has been one of the apps that helped sail our communication boats during the Coronavirus pandemic. The Facebook-owned platform helped people stay connected throughout the lockdown period and it did the same (even more) on New Year’s Eve for people to welcome 2021 without being alone as the app along with other Facebook apps managed to set a record in terms of usage. Read on to know more about it.
WhatsApp calls saw an all-time high on New Year’s Eve
As revealed by Facebook, the company’s apps saw a record-breaking usage on New Year’s Eve so that people stayed connected without the need to actually go out and celebrate.
WhatsApp was used to make more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls made globally on New Year’s Eve. This number is the ‘most-ever’ calls made in a single day via the app. It is suggested that WhatsApp calls increased over 50 percent as compared to last year’s New Year’s Eve.
Facebook Messenger was also used to make group calls in the US as the app’s feature saw twice the usage on NYE as seen on other days. People also celebrated New Year’s Eve on Messenger with the ‘2020 Fireworks’ AR effect as the top effect.
People also used Facebook’s Live feature to celebrate with more and more people as Facebook Live and Instagram Live garnered 55 million broadcasts around the world on December 31, 2020.
Further, Facebook revealed that it adopted ways to keep the traffic in control for users to use the apps smoothly. Facebook, technical program manager, Caitlin Banford, said, “Behind the scenes, Facebook Engineering came together to drive unprecedented efficiency improvements and make our infrastructure more resilient. This work includes load testing, disaster recovery testing, and shuffling capacity. This year, New Year’s Eve looked a lot different, and we had engineering teams across Facebook’s apps, ready to support any issue, so the world could ring in 2021.” So, if everything happened smoothly for you, you know the reason.
Evidently, the usage surpassed the numbers of the earlier COVID-19 pandemic days telling us how people have adapted to everything virtual and helped give out a message that we can do a lot over the internet to remain safe!
