WhatsApp you say? We've got 800 million users: Founder
WhatsApp's breakneck growth has apparently hit a new milestone.
The rapidly-growing messenger application now has 800 million active users, according to a Facebook post made by its founder, Jan Koum, who used the occasion to take a swipe at its competition.
"WhatsApp - now serving 800,000,000 monthly active users," Koum posted on the social network late Friday. "Reminder for the press out there: active and registered users are not the same thing," he added, with a smiling emoticon punctuating the end of the post.
The new milestone comes just a few months after WhatsApp said it had surpassed 700 million users, and comes a year after Facebook paid a multi-billion price tag to acquire the company. Facebook's own message software recently broke 600 million users.
At the current rate of growth, WhatsApp is well on pace to catch up to the social network's more than 1 billion monthly users.
Microsoft was also eyeing WhatsApp, but apparently wasn't willing to pay as much as Facebook for the messaging app, according to a 2014 report in Rolling Stone.