Well what do you know, Facebook-owned WhatsApp continues to pile on new users at an increasing rate. From 250 million users in July last year to the half-billion mark in April this year (a doubling of users in less than a year), the company seems on track to bump up their numbers by another 250 million soon enough.

The newest milestone for the company is 600 million active monthly users, an increase of 100 million users over the space of around four months. That’s a respectable enough figure over the period and might go some way towards justifying the massive price tag (some $19 billion) Facebook paid for the company.

WhatsApp founder and head Jan Koum may have been taking a dig at BlackBerry’s BBM for Android/iOS figures with his tweet announcing the milestone, pointing out that active users are very beasts compared to the total number of registered users.

Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and registered are very different types of numbers…

— jan koum (@jankoum) August 25, 2014

The service’s only real competition, at least in South Africa, seems to be WeChat. Digital Trends reports that the Chinese-owned messaging platform is edging closer to the half-billion mark recently passed by WhatsApp. It’ll be interesting to see how both horses in this race fare towards the end of the year.

Source: Digital Trends