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Social distancing efforts amid the ongoing pandemic have led to an expected increase in social media use by New Year’s Eve, with Facebook claiming to have seen the most calls made in a single day on WhatsApp.
For the holidays affected by the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook experienced its typical usage spikes during New Year’s Eve. In a year dominated by people who work from home and use technology to keep in touch, the social network saw an increase in the use of its services for that night, driven by people staying at home instead of going out socially.
In a blog post, Facebook calls New Years Eve 2020 a “historically busy night” for its services, including setting new records. This included more than 1.4 billion voice and video calls made globally, via WhatsApp, the highest number of calls it has handled in a single day and more than 50% more than the service handled last year.
Facebook Messenger recorded a large number of group video calls in the United States, with almost double the number in the new year even compared to the average day. Instagram Live and Facebook Live hosted more than 55 million live streams on the same night.
Facebook’s technical program manager Caitlin Banford mentions New Year’s Eve annual usage spikes, but says “the early days of the pandemic produced traffic spikes that would dwarf New Year’s Eve multiple times,” a an effect that “lasted for months.” This prompted Facebook Engineering to work on “unprecedented efficiency improvements” to make its infrastructure more resistant to sudden load changes.
“This year, New Year’s Eve looked very different,” suggests Banford, “and we had engineering teams at Facebook applications ready to back up any issues, so the world could ring in 2021.”
