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New Year’s Eve was WhatsApp’s busiest messaging day ever

The company says its users sent 63 billion messages in a 24-hour window.

by Kurt Wagner
Chinese New Year’s Eve in Manila
Chinese New Year’s Eve in Manila
Photo by George Calvelo/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

WhatsApp had a strong start to 2017.

The Facebook-owned messaging app said that New Year’s Eve was its “biggest messaging day ever,” with 63 billion messages sent in a 24 hour window that began at 2 am PT on Dec. 31. WhatsApp has more than a billion users worldwide.

WhatsApp isn’t sharing what the previous record was, but Facebook said last April that Messenger and WhatsApp combine for 60 billion messages per day. So the New Year’s Eve record easily surpassed that number and doesn’t even include any messages sent on Facebook Messenger during that time.

Among the 63 billion messages sent were nearly 8 billion images and 2.4 billion videos.

WhatsApp has historically offered a relatively bare bones messaging experience, but has been slowly expanding into new features over the past couple months. It added video calling in November and a bunch of photo editing features back in October.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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