AS ANOTHER year ends and a fresh one begins, it’s time for that annual flood of happy new year messages.
While many people now use apps like WhatsApp to send their well wishes, many still rely on good old SMS texts.
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Those who have long abandoned text messages may remember an unwanted problem that would occur each year.
Due to people all sending messages at the same time, networks would be jammed and texts would often take a while to go through.
They would sometimes even arrive by the time you’ve woken up on New Year’s Day.
Today it’s less of a problem, as fewer people send texts each year.
More than 100billion messages were sent via WhatsApp across the world on New Year’s Eve 2020, a record for the Meta-owned app.
900million of those came from the UK.
According to Statistica, text messages sent throughout the entire year of 2020 in the UK alone fell to 48.68billion, down from a peak of 150.83billion in 2012.
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But SMS delays can still happen depending on your location and, as ever, the time.
It could be more of an issue than usual this year as people potentially opt for a quiet one this New Year’s Eve as well, due to coronavirus.
“If you’re worried about your texts getting through on New Year’s Eve, there’s a few tricks you can use to beat the queue,” an expert from USwitch.com told The Sun.
“Instead of sending a text you can use messaging apps like WhatsApp or Messenger that send data over Wi-Fi, which won’t suffer the same logjam as mobile networks.
“iPhone users can also send messages to other Apple users over Wi-Fi.
“Alternatively, you can dodge the rush at midnight by sneakily sending your texts to family and friends ten minutes or even an hour early.”
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In other news, NASA has slammed Russia after a missile it fired into one of its own satellites forced the space station to perform an emergency swerve.
Scientists have figured out how fast a type of dinosaur could run – and it would have given Usain Bolt a run for his money.
And Google has confirmed that some of its smartphones are unable to call emergency services due to a software bug.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
