WhatsApp & Facebook Usage Grows By 40% In Lockdown Countries

Reports suggest people are spending more time at home using these apps for live videos, making calls and more.

Usage has increased in countries like Italy, Spain and China for now.

(Photo: iStock)

Video streaming services are not the sole reason why your home internet speeds are slower than usual. A new report says usage of popular social media apps like WhatsApp and Facebook has also seen a huge growth, especially in countries that have been put on lockdown.

This report from Kantar highlights the overall growth in WhatsApp usage has been over 40 percent, and this includes other Facebook-owned apps like Instagram as well.

The report also points out people aged between 18 to 34 years have been the biggest contributor to the growth. These figures look into usages across different phases of the coronavirus pandemic.

For countries in the late stages of the pandemic, usage of these apps has gone over 50 percent, and in some cases, like in Spain, this figure has crossed the 70 percent mark.

Back in China, where the coronavirus made its first impact, usage of local social media apps like WeChat and Weibo increased by 58 percent, the report adds.

“Across all stages of the pandemic, WhatsApp is the social media app experiencing the greatest gains in usage as people look to stay connected.”

<a href="https://www.kantar.com/Inspiration/Coronavirus/COVID-19-Barometer-Consumer-attitudes-media-habits-and-expectations">Kantar report</a>

Similar to this report, Facebook had shared some data which talks about exponential increase in use of its Messenger and Instagram, for doing Live streaming and video calls among others.

“In Italy, specifically, Instagram and Facebook Live views doubled in a week. We have also seen messaging increase over 50 percent and time in group calling (calls with three or more participants) increase by over 1,000 percent during the last month.”&nbsp;

<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/03/keeping-our-apps-stable-during-covid-19/">Facebook data report</a>

The social networking giant admits the traffic across its platform has grown to unprecedented levels and it claims to be ready for the upcoming weeks, where the load on the network is likely to increase further.

“We’re conducting testing and further preparing so we can quickly respond to any problems that might arise with our services.”

<a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2020/03/keeping-our-apps-stable-during-covid-19/">Facebook data report</a>

Impact in India Yet to Come

Having said that, Facebook’s biggest market is India, and the country has been put on lockdown from this week onwards, going up to 15 April for now. With billions of users on its platforms, it’ll be intriguing to see if the company can manage the added load of more users without major glitches.

India has over 400 million WhatsApp users and more than a billion users rely on Facebook for connecting with family and friends.

The aforementioned figures from Kantar and Facebook mostly talk about countries like Italy, China and Spain. With the United States also entering a critical phase of the transmission, along with India, expect the usage growth to be far higher in the coming months.