Facebook’s cross-platform chat app WhatsApp saw a record number of users on New Year’s Eve as some people smartly chose to virtually celebrate the end of 2020 this year. Because even if that damned year of Hades is finally behind us, the Covid-19 pandemic is certainly not.
More than 1.4 billion video and voice calls were made on New Year’s Eve, the most from the app ever in one day a company blog post. While Facebook said New Year’s Eve was historically the busiest night, it saw a spike of about 50% compared to this time last year.
It was also a big day for the company’s other chat app Facebook Messenger, which saw nearly twice as many group video calls as the daily average. There were also 55 million live broadcasts on Facebook and Instagram worldwide.
“[I]In March 2020, the early days of the pandemic caused traffic spikes that would shadow New Year’s Eve several times – and it took months, ”said Caitlin Banford, Facebook’s technical program manager in the post. “Behind the scenes, Facebook Engineering came together to deliver unprecedented efficiency improvements and make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Successfully hosting a record number of users on New Year’s Eve is testament to those months of testing its improved infrastructure and resisting increased traffic to its apps amid widespread lockdowns.
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“This year, New Year’s Eve looked very different, and we had tech teams in Facebook’s apps, ready to support every issue, so the world could ring in 2021.”
Who knows, maybe next year the world will be on fire a little less and we can celebrate New Year’s Eve in person again. Or maybe we’ll be stuck in our underground bunkers after the end of 2021 kill hornets and rodent tornadoes flood the surface. I suspect it’s a 50/50 shot at the moment.