Erin Connolly, Product Manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post on 3 January “The night topped last year’s live broadcast activity, with people sharing 47 percent more live videos than last year”. More than 10 million people around the world went live on Facebook to share their New Years Eve moments with their communities, the company has said.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp also hit a new milestone on New Year’s Eve with more than 75 billion messages sent by its users. This is a new record for them in a single day in the chat app’s history. The previous record was set in 2016, also on New Year’s Eve, with 63 billion messages sent. These numbers were despite the fact that users in India and other parts of the world went into a frenzy after the messaging platform went down at midnight on New Year. It was restored in two hours.
The record was also set despite WhatsApp discontinuing support for Blackberry OS and Windows Phone services on December 31.
For the New Year’s Eve, Facebook had launched several live features, like live Augmented Reality (AR) effects and party hats.
“We saw more than three 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,” Facebook said.
