Instant messaging app, WhatsApp has announced that users on its platform sent over 75 billion messages on 31 December, New Year's Eve as they ushered into 2018. This is the highest-ever number of messages shared on the platform.
According to a press release, WhatsApp explained that of the 75 billion messages sent on New Years's Eve, 20 billion were from India. Those messages sent includes over 13 billion images and 5 billion videos.
The company also claimed that they recorded that much data between 11:59 pm to 12 am on December 31 2017. However, in a twist of events, WhatsApp messaging service went down in the early hours of Jan 1, 2018 for many users across India, Europe, Malaysia and some other regions. The service blackout lasted for an hour.
WhatsApp acknowledged the blackout saying that the outage saying that it had been resolved. Although the company didn't state the reason for the blackout, it however looked like the high volume of messages that came in within that hour might have crashed their server.
Late week, an Indian lawyer threatened to sue WhatsApp if they didn't remove the emoji middle finger which he considered offensive and against the Indian law.
The Facebook owned company recently announced that they will end their support for Blackberry and Windows phones running out dated OS, has about 1 billion active users worldwide and over 200 million users in India which is its biggest market.