Popular messaging application WhatsApp crossed its all-time daily record by processing 27 billion messages in a single day. The declaration came through a tweet from the service’s official Twitter account.
new daily record: 10B+ msgs sent (inbound) and 17B+ msgs received (outbound) by our users = 27 Billion msgs handled in just 24 hours!
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) June 12, 2013
To look at the figures more closely, the company refers to 10 billion inbound sent messages and 17 billion outbound received messages. There is a difference between the two figures because of the existence of group chat. When you send a message in a group chat, while you are sending one message, multiple people will be receiving the same on the other end. That implies that a group chat with 10 other people will have an inbound to outbound ratio of 1:10 for every message that you send. For every message that you send, ten other people receive it. So technically, if we just look at the messages sent, the figure that we would be discussing is of 10 billion sent messages.
This breaks the company’s previous existing record of 7 billion inbound and 11 billion outbound messages leading to a total of 18 billion processed messages in a single day. The previous record however was for New Year’s Eve i.e. 31st December 2012. What is surprising is that just another ordinary day surpassed the record of New Year’s Eve. Asian users have however brought into notice that the pumped up usage might have been due to the Dragon Boat Holiday in Asia. Another significant event on the same day happens to be the Independence Day in Philippines.
Though there are a lot of competing services, none of them have tapped a market bigger than WhatsApp. There has been a surge of services such as WeChat and Hike recently along with previously existing applications such as Nimbuzz. One place where WhatsApp has an edge over other competitors is that of its cross platform availability. Also, partnerships with mobile manufacturers such as Nokia, certainly acts as an added advantage. The recently unveiled Nokia Asha 210 for example even comes with a dedicated WhatsApp button.
Another point to bring into notice might be the fact that now BlackBerry’s popular messaging service will soon be going cross-platform. With the BlackBerry messenger soon available on Android and iOS devices along with the company’s own phones, WhatsApp’s market might stagger.
The company’s CEO had also made a statement recently stating that WhatsApp’s user base was bigger than that of Twitter, hinting at the fact that it is more than 200 million active users at the time.