New Year’s Eve 2017 saw WhatsApp users send a mammoth 75 billion messages across the service.
That number eclipses any other day in its history with the previous record of 65 million on New Year’s Eve 2016 well and truly smashed.
WhatsApp says that of the 75 billion messages sent, 13 billion were photos and five billion included videos.
WhatsApp users could have boosted this number even further if an outage hadn’t hit the service on New Year’s Eve.
The app was down for around an two hours at its busiest time leaving many unable to send or receive messages.
According to website outage monitor, Down Detector, the issues hit users across the globe with Europe the worst affected.
As well as WhatsApp having a record night, its owners Facebook also revealed some big statistics.
In a blog posted on their website, Product Manager, Erin Connolly, revealed that Facebook Live saw a huge increase in activity.
“The night topped last year’s live broadcast activity, with people sharing 47% more live videos than last year,” he said.
“People were excited to count down to 2018 with friends — wherever they were.
“We saw more than 3 times as many broadcasts with a friend on New Year’s Eve compared to an average day in December, making it the biggest day so far for Live With.”
The news of these huge numbers comes as WhatsApp has confirmed it is stopping support for the service on some older phones.
BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8.0 and older, are all affected by the change which came into force on December 31st.
WhatsApp had originally told users that support for these ageing mobile platforms would be dropped by the end of 2016.
But as the end of 2016 drew close, WhatsApp updated the information listed on its website, informing users that the deadline had been pushed back to June 30, 2017.
A further update extended the deadline again until December 31st 2017.
In statement WhatsApp said: “This was a tough decision for us to make, but the right one in order to give people better ways to keep in touch with friends, family, and loved ones using WhatsApp.”
“If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone before the end of 2016 to continue using WhatsApp.”
