From the source
Meta's engineering team described how its infrastructure handled record traffic during the 2026 World Cup, including 30 million messages per second on WhatsApp and 49 million messages per minute across Messenger, Threads, and Instagram Direct.
The company used layered systems such as Taiji, Katran, Proxygen, and AutoScaling to absorb spikes without manual intervention, and pre-provisioned capacity buffers as the most effective lever.
The post also noted that traffic surges primarily occurred during breaks rather than gameplay, and that the resulting runbook is reusable for future large-scale events like the 2028 Olympics.
