San Francisco: WhatsApp users the world over made more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls on New Year s Eve, the most ever calls in a single day on the platform, Facebook said.
As COVID-19 made meeting with friends and family tough, WhatsApp calling on New Year s Eve 2020 increased over 50 per cent compared to the same day last year, the company said on Friday.
Video calling became arguably the most in-demand feature in 2020 as people turned to technology to stay in touch and get things done in the face of social distancing and stay-at-home mandates. Before COVID-19, New Year s Eve generated Facebook s biggest spikes in messaging, photo uploads and social sharing at midnight across the world. However, in March 2020, the early days of the pandemic produced traffic spikes that would dwarf New Year s Eve several times over and it lasted for months, Caitlin Banford, Technical Programme Manager at Facebook, said in a statement.