New Year’s Eve is always a whopper of a night for phone fingering. This morning O2 tipped us off to the fact that between 7:15am on 31 December and 7:15am on 1 January, its revelling UK customers sent nearly a quarter of a billion text messages to other phones.
“O2 customers sent 227 million text messages [over New Year],” an O2 spokesperson exclusively told Crave via email. “That’s up 28 per cent from our previous record on NYE 2007/8.”
To put that in context, Orange also filled us on on its figures. “On New Year’s Eve, Orange customers sent more than 125 million text messages. Most messages were sent between 5pm and 3am, peaking just before midnight.”
In related news, Orange also told us that on Christmas Day its customers sent 1.2 million MMS picture messages, which it said was an 11 per cent increase over the same period the previous year.