WhatsApp has a billion users

Chat service WhatsApp has a billion active users. The service itself has announced this. It is the first chat application to break the one billion users milestone. When it comes to social media, only parent company Facebook is bigger.

This means that the number of active users has more than doubled since the announcement of the acquisition by Facebook in early 2014. WhatsApp points out in the announcement that one in seven people in the world now use the chat service. The growth has been about the same since then and the influx of new users fluctuates between twenty and thirty million users per month.

With the number of one billion users, it is the most used chat service in the world. WhatsApp had actually planned to announce the milestone a few weeks ago, at the same time as it said the service will be free for consumers forever. In order to earn money, the chat service now focuses on services to companies.