30 billion plus messages sent daily.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: WhatsApp, the mobile messaging service bought by Facebook last year for $22 billion, has surpassed the 700 million user milestone.
The announcement, made by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum on his Facebook page, comes less than nine months after the service reached 500 million users in April of 2014.
According to Koum, users are now sending over 30 billion messages every day, which equates to four messages for every person on earth.
“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,” he continued. “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.”
WhatsApp is a relative unknown in the U.S., but the messenger is a veritable juggernaut internationally. The service is particularly popular in Asia, where China currently boasts the world’s largest smartphone market and India is expected to usurp the United States for second position by 2016.
“WhatsApp is on a path to connect to 1 billion people,” said its current owner, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, early last year. “The services that reach that milestone are all incredibly valuable.”
WhatsApp garnered 200 million users in under a year; and as smartphone sales continue their steep upward trend in the United States, Asia, and emerging markets such as Africa, the notion of hitting one billion users seems more inevitable than not.