On New Year's Eve 2021, more than 1,4 billion WhatsApp voice and video calls were made worldwide. It is the highest WhatsApp score in the history of the application. The number of WhatsApp calls, compared to the same day last year, increased twice.
In Messenger, users celebrated the New Year with augmented reality effects. The use of various holiday masks and effects has grown. The most popular AR effect in the US is 2020 Fireworks.
New Year's Eve 2020 also marks a record for the number of Messenger group video call rooms created. This feature appeared in the app relatively recently due to coronavirus quarantine.
There were over 55 million live streams on Facebook and Instagram worldwide on New Year's Eve.
This surge in traffic was a challenge for the entire Facebook tech team.
In 2020, coronavirus quarantine forced Facebook engineers to team up to achieve unprecedented efficiency gains and make infrastructure more resilient. This work includes load testing, disaster recovery testing, and shuffling capabilities. On New Year's Eve, Facebook's application engineering teams were ready to support any issue.