In February, Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced it had reached one billion users worldwide, and this week, the company added another metric to demonstrate its ongoing traction and growth. According to a brief post on the company blog, WhatsApp claims that it’s now handling more than 100 million voice calls per day on its service.
This is equivalent to over 1,100 calls per second, the post adds, hinting that it will make calling better in the months to come. (The company was spotted testing video calling this spring.)
What’s notable also about this news is that voice calling is still a relatively new feature for WhatsApp. The company introduced the feature on Android in March 2015, then brought it to iOS the following month. At the time, WhatsApp had 800 million monthly active users and said it was handling more messages than there are global SMS texts sent each day.
Competitors, including Facebook’s messaging service Messenger don’t break out their voice calling milestones in quite the same way, making a direct comparison more difficult.
For instance, Microsoft’s 12-year old Skype, says its users make up to 3 billion minutes of calls per day. That’s a bigger number, but it’s counting talk time, not actual calls, as WhatsApp is doing. Microsoft also said at its BUILD conference this year that the software is used by over 300 million users monthly.
Facebook, meanwhile, announced this April it had reached 900 million users. Last spring, it had also noted that Messenger makes up 10% of mobile global VOIP. This made it challenging to compare its figures to Skype, too, since Skype users also place calls on the desktop.
The company more recently said that users spent more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger combined, but didn’t include WhatsApp in that round-up.