The World Cup did not just fill stadiums and TV schedules. It also pushed Meta’s apps into record territory, with the company saying WhatsApp hit more than 29 million messages per second during Argentina’s Round of 16 match against Egypt.
Meta said the spike beat the platform’s previous record, set during the 2022 final, and showed how football fans were using chats, posts and clips to live around the tournament, not only during the 90 minutes.
Instagram became the clearest scoreboard for player hype. Meta said final-squad players added 213.6 million activated followers between June 11 and July 11, lifting their combined audiences from 3.26 billion to 3.47 billion.
The breakout account was Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha, who Meta said jumped from 37,000 followers to 28.8 million after his tournament run. Cape Verde’s squad gained 32.1 million net followers overall, while Erling Haaland added 23 million and Cristiano Ronaldo reached 676 million.
The conversation also spread across Threads and Facebook. Meta said tournament-tagged posts on Threads drew 1.5 billion impressions, while World Cup content from the tournament community reached about 15 million people a day and peaked at 25 million on July 6. On Facebook, people had published 80 million posts mentioning the World Cup since the tournament began.
Rob Pilgrim, Meta’s global football lead, said the company wanted its apps to become the home for the culture around the matches. “While fans watch the 90 minutes on TV, they come to our apps for everything around it — the community, the conversation, the clips and memes they love to share and debate.”
