Posted this on a comment above but systems like Whatsapp likely sent an insane amount of data as well but used only 16 servers over 1.5 billion users at time of acquisition. Modern NICs can handle millions of requests a second - I still feel there is a lot of excess here.
Feels like the comparison is irrelevant. I'm guessing WhatsApp would have infrastructure challenges if all of their chats were group messages including the entirety of their user base, search, moderation, ranking, ads, etc. Isn't WhatsApp more comparable to only DMs?
