Mobile messaging app WhatApp hits 900 mn users milestone

Mobile messaging app WhatsApp now has 900 million regular and active users around the world, with the 100 million users it added, in the last five months.

"WhatsApp now has 900 million monthly active users," WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum said in a Facebook post.  The popular messaging app was acquired by social networking site Facebook last year, in its biggest buyout till date, for a whopping $19 billion. Koum's post, also tagged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who posted him a congratulatory message over reaching the milestone.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also congratulated Koum in a post saying "900 million people now use WhatsApp every month to stay in touch with family and friends around the world. Congratulations to Jan Koum and everyone at WhatsApp on reaching this incredible milestone and for still finding time to make us all laugh."

Earlier, WhatsApp had said its service had seen strong uptake, especially in developing nations like Brazil, India and Russia.

WhatsApp had said in November that India accounted for 70 million of its active users, which was over a tenth of its global users back then.

In India WhatsApp has rivals like LINE, Viber and Hike.

The milestone represented an increase of 100 million users since the company's announcement that it had 800 million users in April and a growth rate of 50 per cent in the past 12 months.

WhatsApp had experienced consistent growth since its acquisition by Facebook last year. At the beginning of the year, the service counted 700 million users, up from the 600 million it had in August 2014.

While the WhatsApp's user numbers still trailed that of parent Facebook which has 1.44 billion monthly active users, they are nearly triple that of Twitter.

Twitter revealed in July that it had 316 million monthly users, a growth rate of just 3 per cent from the previous quarter.

"Congrats to Jan, the WhatsApp team and whole community on reaching 900 million people!" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his post.

WhatsApp started life as a basic text-messaging app in 2009, but one that also offered the ability to leave voice messages.

The app, which operated on just about every mobile platform, had also rolled out a voice calling feature, firing a shot across the bow of services like Skype and Viber.