WhatsApp broke a few records on Tuesday when its 465 million users sent and received 64 billion messages in just 24 hours. The popular messaging app announced its grand achievement on Twitter and then, on Wednesday, its users began to complain of outages.
WhatsApp users sent 20 billion messages and received 44 billion messages in one single day, the company said, amounting to a grand total of 64 billion messages processed. This new record absolutely shattered the company's previous record of 54 billion messages on New Year's Eve 2013.
Of course, you could say that the number was a bit exaggerated, as WhatsApp counted every message sent and received in a group chat for each person in the group. So if there were 5 people in a group, each message sent or received counted 5 separate times. Nonetheless, 64 billion messages in just one day is extremely impressive.
WhatsApp is available on every major platform, from iOS and Android to Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The popular app is also widely considered the messaging app of choice in most countries around the world. So, reaching 64 billion messages in 24 isn't really all that surprising.
However, it is amazing that WhatsApp doesn't experience more outages due to the high volume of traffic it receives on a daily basis. WhatsApp is loved by its users not only because it is a great messaging app with no ads, but also because it has very reliable service. Ever since Facebook announced its plans to acquire WhatsApp, there have been more outages.
The first one lasted 210 minutes and occurred in late February. Now, the day after WhatsApp announced its 64 billion message milestone, some users reported an outage in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Some users received the following message: "Sorry, our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore the functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Needless to say, users took to Twitter to express their panic. However, the situation appears to have been resolved already, as WhatsApp messages are now being sent and received without incident.
