WhatsApp recorded a 50% increase in calling on New Year’s Eve 2020 as compared to 2019. As per the stats, WhatsApp users made 1.4 billion video, voice calls on New Year’s Eve. While most people spent the day inside their homes, WhatsApp became the only convenient option to celebrate the year with near and dear phones. Facebook too witnessed 55 million live broadcasts globally on New Year’s Eve.
While 2020 has not been the most happening for a lot of industries, the technology sector is the only sector that seemed to have benefited. COVID-19 forced people to turn to technology stay in touch and get things done without flouting the social distancing norms. Video-calling feature, that was not so important in the past, became one of the most sought after tool and that is how Zoom’s business skyrocketed.
Technical program manager at Facebook, Caitlin Banford said in a blog, “Before COVID-19, New Year’s Eve generated Facebook’s biggest spike 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. Begins 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.”
Facebook admitted that new records were set on New Year’s Eve 2020. The blog read, “At Facebook, we saw surges on video chatting all year across Messengers, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and last night was no exception. New Year’s Eve is a historically busy night for our services, but this year set new records.”
So as per the data shared by Facebook, more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls were made on New Years’ Eve 2020 globally, the most ever call in a single day on WhatsApp. The messaging app saw a 50% spike in calls as compared to the previous year.
