In each of our apps, we saw people communicating and sharing in far greater volumes, and needing new options for their new reality. Our engineers responded with incredible speed and focus: Within six weeks of the WHO declaring a pandemic in early March, we’d launched entirely new products designed to help people stay connected in this new, socially distant reality. Teams raced to prioritize these new products, like Messenger Rooms for group video chat and Facebook Shops for small businesses suddenly needing to pivot to an online-only world. Products that would normally take up to a year to build and launch were completed in just a couple of months, as most of our engineers focused on the products most needed by people working, learning, and socializing from home.
We saw similar dynamics in Workplace, our business collaboration product, used by more than 5 million paid users around the world, and on Portal, our dedicated video calling hardware. And when Quest 2, our new virtual reality headset, became available for preorders in September, demand was through the roof.
In each of these spaces, our engineers are still learning about the new ways people are communicating and collaborating. They’re still learning how they can work together to keep an extraordinarily complicated operation running under the weight of an unprecedented surge in demand, and they’re doing it all from bedrooms and dining tables. And from these learnings — the daily experiences of a new world, shared by our staff and our users — we’re seeing glimpses of the future of the internet.
To learn more about the work we did in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, join the Keeping the Lights On @Scale series, which starts on November 24.