Facebook’s multiplatform chat app, WhatsApp, had a record number of users on New Year’s Eve, as some people intelligently chose to celebrate the end of 2020 practically this year. Because even if that cursed Hades year is finally behind us, the covid-19 pandemic definitely not.
Over 1.4 billion video and voice calls were made on New Year’s Eve, the highest number ever from the app in a single day, for a company blog post. Although Facebook has claimed that New Year’s Eve has historically been the busiest night, it has seen an increase of about 50% compared to last year.
It was a great day for the company’s other chat app, Facebook Messenger, which had almost twice as many group video calls compared to its daily average. There were also 55 million live streams on Facebook and Instagram around the world.
“[I]n March 2020, the early days of the pandemic produced spikes in traffic that would disrupt New Year’s Eve several times – and lasted for months, ”said Facebook technical program manager Caitlin Banford in the post. “Behind the scenes, Facebook Engineering has teamed up to drive unprecedented efficiency improvements and make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Successfully hosting a record number of users on New Year’s Eve is a testament to those months of testing its strengthened infrastructure and supporting increased traffic to its applications amid widespread blocking.
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“This year, New Year’s Eve was very different and we had engineering teams in every Facebook application, ready to support any problem, so that the world could sound in 2021.”
Who knows, maybe this time of next year the world will be a little less on fire and we can celebrate New Year’s Eve in person again. Or maybe we’ll be stuck in the late 2021 countdown in our underground bunkers after the murder wasps and rodent tornadoes invade the surface. My guess is that it is a 50/50 shot at this point.