Despite outage, WhatsApp users in India exchanged over 20 billion messages on New Year's Eve

WhatsApp users in India sent a record over 20 billion messages to exchange greetings on New Year's Eve, the Facebook-owned company said on 4 January.

A 3D printed Whatsapp logo. Reuters

The messages were sent between 12 am till 11.59 pm on 31 December.

"New Year's Eve was WhatsApp's biggest messaging day ever, closing out a successful year for the company that included the introduction of several new features," WhatsApp said in a statement.

The Indian users had sent 14 billion messages through the platform on New Year's Eve last year.

The top five popular features of WhatsApp included video calling, live location, delete for everyone (messages), new album view for photos and "Status" which saw over 300 million daily active users.

WhatsApp currently has over 200 million monthly active users in India.

Globally, WhatsApp hit a new milestone with more than 75 billion messages sent by its users. The 75 billion number included 13 billion images and five billion videos.

The messaging platform registered these numbers despite the fact that users in India and other parts of the world went into a tizzy after WhatsApp went down at midnight on New Year. It was restored in two hours.