WhatsApp is currently delivering over 100 billion messages a day, according to Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook CEO delivered the news in an earnings call with investors, TechCrunch reports, in which the company also reported a net income of $7.8 billion in the period from July-September this year.
The messaging platform has been in a league of its own for a while now, dwarfing competing apps both in terms of the number of worldwide users and the sheer volume of messages it processes.
100 billion messages per day is a new benchmark for the app, and is roughly equivalent to the company processing the same number of messages every day as it did on New Year’s Eve 2019.
The figures show just how far WhatsApp has come in recent years, with Facebook having previously reported as recently as 2016 that its two messaging apps – WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger – were processing a combined 60 billion messages.
In a tweet following the revelation, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said:
This year we’ve all relied on messaging more than ever to keep up with our loved ones and get business done
We are proud that WhatsApp is able to deliver roughly 100B messages every day and we’re excited about the road ahead
WhatsApp also continues to grow its total number of users, most recently hitting the 2 billion user mark. That’s double the 1 billion users of Chinese messaging app WeChat, and 500 million more than are believed to be on Apple’s iMessage service.
Apple’s messaging ecosystem continues to be the closest challenger to Facebook’s two apps. And while earlier this year Tim Cook reported that iMessage and FaceTime were seeing record usage, the company has not revealed specific figures for its platform.
In addition to being the runaway favourite messaging app, TechCrunch reports that data from large markets like India suggests that WhatsApp may be the world’s most popular smartphone app, full stop.
