WhatsApp is Now Delivering Roughly 100 Billion Messages a Day

WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app owned by Facebook, is now delivering roughly 100 billion messages a day, the company's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the quarterly earnings call Thursday. From a report: For some perspective, users exchanged 100 billion messages on WhatsApp last New Year's Eve. That is the day when WhatsApp tops its engagement figures, and as many of you may remember, also the time when the service customarily suffered glitches in the past years. (No outage on last New Year's Eve!) At this point, WhatsApp is just competing with itself. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016.

Zuck turning everything to shite

[bobcat7677]

Whatsapp became the go-to messaging platform because it had everything you wanted and more while just working...globally. Since facebook bought it, trust in the platform is waning because everybody knows Zuck does shady stuff and uptime has suffered under facebook rule. Basically the only things carrying the platform right now are momentum and the fact that they haven't changed the actual app much since the takeover. But assuming facebook does the same thing to Whatsapp that Microsoft did to Skype, event

Re:

[thegarbz]

Since facebook bought it, trust in the platform is waning because everybody knows Zuck does shady stuff and uptime has suffered under facebook rule.

Yeah we can see that in the record high usage figures, complete lack of any shady stuff that has happened with WhatsApp, and the fact that it went down for about an hour in the past 2 years.

But assuming facebook does the same thing to Whatsapp that Microsoft did to Skype

Create a bloated PC service and bundle it with Windows 10? Do you always assume completely irrelevant and unfounded things?

Re:

[whoever57]

Whatsapp became the go-to messaging platform because it had everything you wanted and more while just working...globally.

And the fact that, for many subscribers, SMS and MMS messages were not free.

Is messages per day the right metric?

[larryjoe]

Is messages per day the right metric? I would think that distinct users is more telling about how popular a service is. Maybe WhatsApp users are more chatty with more messages per day. Or maybe they hit the send button often to break messages into short snippets. It's hard to characterize popularity without more data.

Re:

[thegarbz]

I would think that distinct users is more telling about how popular a service is.

Distinct users isn't an indication of how much a service gets used.

Re:

[nospam007]

"Is messages per day the right metric?"

Exactly!

100 billion messages a day with 'u up?' sounds strange.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

Messages per day is a metric how much hardware/software/interconnect power you need to make the service operational.

A day has 86,400 seconds. 100 billion divide by that is 1,157,407 messages per second. That includes, pictures and movies and prerendered links ...

Delivering 100 billion messages a day

[93 Escort Wagon]

... straight into the gaping maw of Facebook.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Yep, end to end encrypted. They can shuddup and take all my randomly incoherent bits.

Re:

[JaredOfEuropa]

FB own the app, so they could just extract the plaintext messages from the endpoint.

Re:

[thegarbz]

They could. They could do a lot of things to fuck over users in a lot of ways. The question is does it make sense and does it outweigh the risk of getting caught and burning their $22bn investment. Does it make sense in a world that is going over Facebook's every minor activity with a fine tooth comb. Does it make sense when regulators are already threatening to break up the company.

You'd be amazed at the countless ways you do not get fucked over every single day.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Facebook has been caught doing things they shouldn't often enough that I will never take their claims about anything at face value. They seem to be firm believers in the principle that "it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask for permission".

Serious question - is WhatsApp open source?

Re:

[thegarbz]

Facebook has been caught doing things they shouldn't often enough that I will never take their claims about anything at face value.

Fortunately you don't need. Plenty of actual experts have looked into it and given it a clean bill of health.

Serious question - is WhatsApp open source?

Serious question - Do you not understand that external analysis is an actual thing and that having the source code is not essential to give software a clean bill of health?

The end to end encryption of WhatsApp is currently implemented in a way that passes the bar for reasonable doubt. Be that security experts who have looked at that, or Facebook's own responses to multiple government and court orders

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

WhatsApp is one of the few that does proper end-to-end encryption without leaking data. I guess the legacy of not being a Facebook product is that it's actually decently secure.

Regular moaning by law enforcement that they can't crack it is also encouraging.

Re:

[backslashdot]

Before Facebook acquired it, it had a reputation for the worst security ever. It wasn't even encrypted until 2012 (though that encryption had vulnerabilities) .. and end to end encryotion was added over two years AFTER Facebook acquired it.

Why isn't Facebook Messenger discontinued?

[kriston]

Remind me why Facebook Messenger hasn't been folded into WhatsApp?

Re:

[thegarbz]

Anti-trust. WhatsApp's purchase had conditions. Hell they've already been fined 110million EUR over breach of one of the conditions.

Re:

[antdude]

Why hasn't Instagram merged with Facebook? :P

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[rookiebeotch]

it is actually really good. Mainly started out to communicate to people overseas where, contrary to the media, internet and cell service is insanely expensive. So you can chat and call friends overseas when they leach free Wifi from Cafes and such. hopefully Mark Zucktard doesnt force or integrate it with facebook becuase then im out. i dont do drugs.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: Clueless

[imcdona]

With Signal we know it's secure.
See here: https://signal.org/bigbrother/ [signal.org]

I'm tied of big tech

[imcdona]

I moved my family and friends to the open source alternative Signal [signal.org].

Encryption doesn't matter here, Google has 'em all

[R9si6a]

People seem easily to forget one of the most important design flaws in Whatsapp's encryption. Whenever somebody makes a backup of Whatsapp's history that gets synced to that persons Google drive - that backup is unencrypted. While it remains unknown to the public if Google and/or some other entities access those backups, the mere fact that it would be possible in principle, is just... ouch.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

Whenever somebody makes a backup of Whatsapp's history that gets synced to that persons Google drive - that backup is unencrypted.
And how would that work on my iPhone or Mac? Seriously?

Re:

[R9si6a]

Thank you for pointing out that difference. Google drive is only used with Android phones of course, so Google only has potential access to those backups that are made with Android phones. However, the problem applies to iPhones too. It's just not Google in that case but Apple instead who has potential access.