WhatsApp: Record number of messages sent each day

7 January 2015

By Amelia Butterly

Newsbeat reporter

Every day more than 30bn WhatsApp messages are now sent, according to new figures revealed by the company's CEO, Jan Koum.

There are also a record 700m monthly active users.

Koum says the organisation is "humbled and excited" by the amount of users it now has.

But the numbers are so huge that they are almost impossible to understand - so let's break them down into something a bit more straightforward.

WhatsApp message reading: "30bn messages a day = about four messages for every single person in the world"

WhatsApp message reading: "More than 700m monthly users - that's the same as the population of the US, the UK, France, Russia, Germany, Australia and New Zealand combined."

WhatsApp message reading: "On average each of WhatsApp's users sends about 43 messages a day."

WhatsApp message reading: "If 30bn messages are sent a day, that means 347,222 messages are sent every second."

WhatsApp message reading: "Facebook = 1.35bn monthly users. Instagram = 300m users. Twitter = 284 monthly users."

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum's official statement

Facebook post from Jan Koum reading: "I hope you all had a happy and peaceful holiday season. Today, we're thrilled to share that WhatsApp has more than 700 million monthly active users. Additionally, every day our users now send over 30 billion messages. As humbled and excited as we are by these numbers and our continued growth, we're even more excited to keep building a great product in 2015. Most of all, we're grateful that so many of you are using WhatsApp to stay in touch with your friends and family, business colleagues and classmates. We promise to continue working hard to make WhatsApp even better."

Facebook/Jan Koum

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