Over 30 million WhatsApp messages per second were sent during the 2026 World Cup final
Unsurprisingly, the 2026 Fifa World Cup final between Argentina and Spain was one of the most watched sporting events of all time, with roughly 62 million viewers in the US alone for the match. Football is best enjoyed with others of course, and even if you couldn’t be there with your friends, it seems that a lot of people still talked about the match over on WhatsApp.
So many texts were happening on WhatsApp in fact that according to Meta, they saw over 30 million messages per second being sent over on the messaging platform. The 2026 Fifa World Cup in fact broke the previous record held by the 2022 edition’s final of 25 million WhatsApp messages per second twice, having hit 29 million messages per second during the Round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt, when the former champions came back late to beat Mo Salah and co.
Meta also shared some stats for Instagram, with the World Cup squads collectively adding 213.6 million activated followers for a combined following of 3.47 billion. You’ve probably heard by now of the Cape Verde keeper Vozinha, whose heroics saw him go from 37,000 to 28.8 million followers, an increase of 77,000%. He also drove Cape Verde’s stats to the top, with Cape Verde players in total netting 32.1 million new followers.
Meanwhile, Erling Haaland came in second for new followers, with 23 million additional followers on Instagram after leading Norway to the quarterfinals. In third place was Cristiano, with his 10 million extra followers meaning he now has a whopping 676 million followers on Instagram.
As for Facebook, Meta says that over 80 million posts mentioning the World Cup were posted since the beginning of the tournament, while on Threads, there were 1.5 billion impressions on tournament-related posts.
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