WhatsApp may have been down for two hours last night, but the service is attracting record number of users on a daily basis. The Facebook owned messaging platform with a billion users is only gaining from its blatant duplication of Snapchat’s Stories feature.
WhatsApp’s new Status feature now boasts of 175 million daily active users. Snapchat, on the other hand, had 161 million daily active users as of February. This is not the first time a Facebook-owned product has beaten Snapchat at its game. Thanks to the social network’s 360 degree push to copy Snap, even Instagram Stories has become more popular than Snapchat, with over 200 million daily active users.
Snapchat recently suffered from some bad publicity, when a disgruntled employee claimed that the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel called India a poor country. This led to a nationwide backlash and many Indian users stopped using the app, bringing its rating down to one star on the Play Store. However, Snapchat’s ratings have since bounced back to four stars on the Play Store.