Apple says people send as many as 200,000 iMessages per second

Apple's iMessage handles an absurd amount of messages: sometimes as many as 200,000 per second, according to Apple services boss Eddy Cue.

The stat was revealed during a podcast $4 published on Friday.

"The scale for this is truly amazing because of the usage, I mean [people] rely on these [services] for their lives," Cue said. "We peak out at 200,000 messages a second that are sent on messages for example."

At peak rates, that would work out to 63 quadrillion messages per year. In 2014, $4 that Apple handles 40 billion iMessages per day.