300 million people use Facebook video calling service

Facebook’s audio and video calling service now has 300 million users. This means that the service, which became available three years ago, has almost as many users as Skype ten years older.

Facebook Messenger has a total of one billion users, David Marcus, who leads the Messenger service, told TechCrunch. With these user numbers, Facebook Messenger accounts for 10 percent of all VoIP calls worldwide, Venturebeat wrote in July.

There has always been a chat function available within Facebook. In 2010, the chat feature gained support for XMPP, then called Jabber, to allow third-party apps to connect to it. A year later, Facebook released its own Messenger app for Android, iOS and, later that year, BlackBerry OS. Windows Phone followed in 2014. The VoIP function became available in 2013 and video support was added in 2015. Since this year, group conversations can also be held, but not yet with video. This will come later, Marcus says. Messenger is now one of the largest voip services in the world, after Skype and WhatsApp.