The online calling on WhatsApp has increased by 50 percent on January 1, 2021 as compared to New Year’s Eve in 2020.
Messaging app WhatsApp hit a new record on the New Year 2021 with over 1.4 billion voice and video calls made on the app. This is the highest number of calls ever made on the messaging app in a single day, 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,” Caitlin Banford, technical program manager at Facebook, said.

Facebook Engineering came together to drive unprecedented efficiency improvements and make its infrastructure more resilient. This work includes load testing, disaster recovery testing, and shuffling capacity. Facebook had engineering teams across Facebook’s apps, ready to support any issue, so the world could ring in 2021.

Facebook noted that there were more than 55 million live broadcasts across Facebook and Instagram globally on New Year’s Eve.