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 Thursday.

These were messages that were sent between 12 a.m. till 11.59 p.m. on December 31.

"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.

Just as people were ringing in the New Year and getting ready to send across their greetings, the app crashed leaving users disappointed. 

It was restored in two hours and a WhatsApp spokesperson apologised for the inconvenience and said that the issue had been resolved shortly after the outage. 

India happens to be WhatsApp’s biggest market with around 200 million users. 

Earlier, in November 2017, WhatsApp had stopped worked globally with users across the world facing difficulty in accessing the app. 

Down Detector, a website which specialises in websites and app outages, said the app was not functional across geographies and added that connecting to the app was the most reported problem. 

Image source: Tayloright