The social media giant Facebook announced that COVID-19 has increased its services usage around the world. In many of the countries, total messaging has increased more than 50% over February. “The usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage almost every day,” said the company in a post.

Similarly, voice and video calling have more than doubled on Messenger and WhatsApp. In Italy – where the deaths due to COVID-19 overlapped China this week – Facebook saw up to 70% more time spent across its apps since the crisis arrived in the country, and Instagram and Facebook Live views doubled in a week. 

“We have also seen messaging increase over 50% and time in group calling (calls with three or more participants) increase by over 1,000% during the last month”, the company said. 

Avoiding giving numbers, Facebook claims that as many other business in the world, it’s been affected by the economic crisis. “We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19”.