Facebook Messenger has a billion active users

Facebook Messenger has one billion monthly active users. The social network has announced this. Facebook’s chat app has been around for about five years. Growth seems to be accelerating in recent years.

Facebook reported in November 2014 that it had reached the milestone of half a billion users on Messenger. With Wednesday’s announcement of one billion users who use the service at least once a month, it can be deduced that about 25 million active users per month will be added.

Messenger, along with WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, is the only chat app with more than a billion users. Competitor WeChat has around 750 million mainly Chinese users and Line has around 220 million.

In addition to the milestone, Facebook reported a few other stats. Every day, users send 22 million gifs to each other, while chatters send 300 million flower stickers on Mother’s Day. Messenger arose from the acquisition of chat app Beluga, a chat application of three former Google employees.