Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform and owns two other platforms: the world’s biggest digital places where more than half of the world’s population gather. As such, since the year has begun, it would be strange if we didn’t talk about the world’s largest social media platform.
The company revealed some statistics about the number of calls that WhatsApp conducted on New Year’s Eve platform. And the data is unsurprising, to say the least. The social media platform, WhatsApp registered over 1.4 billion voice and video calls on New Year’s Eve globally. If the new data is compared to last year’s performance, then the gain is almost 50% compared to 2019.
According to sources, not only one-to-one video calls but also group video calls witnessed a surge.
Caitlin Banford, technical program manager at Facebook said, “Before COVID-19, New Year’s Eve generated Facebook’s biggest spikes in messaging, photo uploads, and social sharing at midnight across the world. However, in March 2020, the early days of the pandemic produced traffic spikes that would dwarf New Year’s Eve several times over — and it lasted for months. 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.”
