Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has revealed that over 63 billion messages were sent using the Whatsapp service on New Year’s Eve. Whatsapp has a global reach of more than a billion users. 8 billion of these messages were images while 2.4 billion were videos. Indeed, it was an incredible start to 2017 for the messaging service. Reports have it that a significant number of these messages were generated by India, which had 14 billion messages being sent on the eve of the New Year.

Facebook has acknowledged that the New Year record surpassed the earlier record set on the eve of Diwali, whereby only 8 billion messages were exchanged through the app in India.  Notably, it is not long since Whatsapp rolled out the ability to share animated GIF images on the platform as well as the ability to stream shared videos

WhatsApp stops working on older versions of Android, iOS

Besides the news regarding the popularity of the messaging platform, Whatsapp also reported having stopped working on older versions of Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Nonetheless, the messaging app has continued to grow in popularity, which has perhaps necessitated the expansion of its new features in the last couple of months.

Meanwhile, part of a statement from the company read, “Whatsapp continues to be an essential part of our lives. Whether it is celebrating festivals and occasions with friends and family or staying connected.”

WhatsApp adding new feature to iPhone app

Still more is going on behind the scenes of WhatsApp. Word has it that there is an upcoming feature from Whatsapp for its iPhone app, which will allow users to edit and revoke sent messages. However, it has been disabled for WhatsApp for iPhone beta app users but it is likely to be available soon. An additional rumor states that another feature will enable previews of shared archive files.

In the meantime, Facebook closed its stock at $124.90 witnessing an increase of $1.49 or 1.21%.