Tag: web services

WhatsApp passes 800,000,000 active users

whatsapp-numbers

TechCrunch is reporting on WhatsApp passing the 800,000,000 active users mark.  Almost exactly a year ago, it was at 500 million active users.  I don’t care much about WhatsApp’s business or service, but from the technical point of view this is quite significant.  That’s almost a million active users acquired every day for the last year.  That’d be a challenge for anyone to handle.  Thinking that this growth might have been not too linear gives me digital goose bumps.

I haven’t seen anything recent describing their infrastructure, but this article from last year provides a starting point for the imagination:  Erland + FreeBSD + 550 servers, with preference for larger box with loads of RAM and cores.  I’m sure that have grown quite a bit in a year too.

WhatsApp passes 500,000,000 active users

According to the WhatsApp blog:

Thanks to all of you, half a billion people around the world are now regular, active WhatsApp users. In the last few months, we’ve grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day. We could go on, but for now, it’s more important that we get back to work – because here at WhatsApp, we’re just getting started.

Now that’s quite impressive, not only for the number of active users but for the amount of the activity as well.

36+ Terabytes of free cloud storage

Chinese cloud service offers 36+ TB of free storage (!!!).  The biggest disadvantage here is that the whole website is in Chinese, but apparently there are several translations and guides in other languages available online.  Immediately after the registration you get 7 GB.  Once the desktop client is installed you get another 10 TB.  If you install a mobile client, you get additional 26 TB.  And then you can increase it even further by clicking through ads, promotions, etc.

Via Yuri Timofeev.