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Facebook’s cross-platform chat app WhatsApp saw a record number of users on New Year’s Eve as some people cleverly chose to celebrate the end of 2020 practically this year. Because even if that cursed year of Hades is finally behind us, the covid-19 pandemic is definitely not.
Over 1.4 billion video calls and voice calls were made on New Years Eve, the most in the app in a single day, for a company blog post. While Facebook said that New Year’s Eve has historically been the busiest night, it saw an increase of about 50% compared to this time last year.
It was also a great day for the company’s other chat app, Facebook Messenger, which saw nearly twice the number of group video calls compared to its daily average. There were also 55 million live streams on Facebook and Instagram around the world.
“[I]In March 2020, the early days of the pandemic produced traffic spikes that would dwarf New Year’s Eve multiple times, and lasted for months, ”Facebook’s technical program manager Caitlin Banford said in the post. “Behind the scenes, Facebook Engineering came together to drive unprecedented efficiency improvements and make our infrastructure more resilient.”
Successfully hosting record numbers of users on New Years Eve is a testament to those months of testing your hardened infrastructure and withstanding the surge in traffic to your applications amid widespread crashes.
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“This year, New Year’s Eve looked very different and we had teams of engineers in Facebook applications, ready to take care of any problems, so that the world could ring in 2021.”
Who knows, maybe next year the world is a little less on fire and we can celebrate New Years Eve in person again. Or maybe we’ll be stuck counting the end of 2021 in our underground bunkers after the killer wasps and rodent tornadoes invade the surface. I guess it’s a 50/50 shot at this point.
