In a blog post, WhatsApp announced that it now has over 500 million active users. These users share 700 million photos and 100 million videos daily. Last year in August, WhatsApp had 200 million users while the number doubled to 430 million in January 2014. And earlier on April 1, WhatsApp had announced that its users exchanged 64 billion messages in 24 hours, setting a new record for the service.

"In the last few months, we've grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia," Koum wrote. In an interview given to Re/Code, Koum went into a little more detail. He told Re/Code that WhatsApp now has 48 million active users in India alone, its single largest country. Koum noted that this number is about half the number of Facebook's active users in India. The company has arranged deals with carriers to offer unlimited WhatsApp data usage for less than Rs. 20 per month.

He also said the free voice calls feature on WhatsApp would be available to users in the coming months.

                                 

Koum told Recode that despite the fast growth, WhatsApp was not yet thinking about monetisation. He said the focus remained on providing clean and usable instant messaging service.

And after the deal Facebook and WhatsApp now have nearly 1.5 billion active users, giving Facebook a huge reach, specially on mobiles.