WhatsApp Just Reached an Impressive New Milestone

The mobile messaging platform WhatsApp is getting more popular. The company announced via its Twitter account Monday night that it processed a record 64 billion messages in a single day recently. The total was comprised of 20 billion messages sent by users and 44 billion received. That’s up significantly from the last publicly disclosed figure of 54 billion messages (18 billion sent, 36 billion received) processed on New Year’s Eve 2013.

Facebook agreed to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp in February because CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks the messaging app can grow from its current 450 million monthly users to 1 billion users within a few years. The companies said WhatsApp was adding 1 million new users each day at the time of its purchase. Clearly it’s still growing at a healthy clip.

The figures also show that WhatsApp is increasingly being used for group discussions. On New Year’s Eve, a WhatsApp user sent a message to two people on average. On the new record day, people sent messages to 2.2 people on average, a 10 percent increase. Internet users are increasingly looking for private platforms to have discussions, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, rather than openly broadcasting all their thoughts to their social network on Facebook. But Zuckerberg now owns the fastest-growing platform for that purpose.

In fact, all of Facebook’s high-profile properties are growing quickly. Last week the company revealed that Instagram has passed 200 million monthly users, up from 150 million users in September.