Woah. WhatsApp says it now has half a billion active users

Ah, WhatsApp. The little green multiplatform messaging app isn’t a stranger to big numbers. On a good day, it can process 64-billion messages in 24 hours. We already knew it was bigger than Twitter — which is why any outage has people worldwide all but taking to the streets in anguish. But WhatsApp is still growing — so fast in fact, that it’s headed towards the big 1-billion.

While the team is generally quite quiet on the user numbers front (it very rarely releases updates on just how much its app is used), it has just consented to post a tiny note about quite a massive milestone. The team says its messaging app now has 500-million “regular, active” users — which, given the popularity of reporting monthly active user figures, we’re assuming means that half a billion people globally use WhatsApp every month.

To put that in perspective, Facebook has 1.23-billion monthly active users, while Twitter has 232-million, Instagram 150-million and Google Plus around 300-million at last count. Of course, WhatsApp plays in a slightly different space — it’s more about sharing messages and media in one-on-one or group chats than broadcasting your latest updates to followers or friends, and it’s mobile-only. Still, it’s an impressive number, especially considering it’s 50-million more than the last figure we saw two months ago when the Facebook acquisition was announced, suggesting the user numbers are still on the up in a big way.

So, where is all that growth coming from? According to the team, it’s seeing a major uptake in emerging markets like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia. It’s also dealing with a staggering amount of media sharing — around 700-million photos and 100-million videos are sent using WhatsApp every single day.

Although WhatsApp hasn’t released updated insights about how many people use its app daily, back when its sale to Facebook was announced, it was seeing 320-million daily active users.