Fun Facts About APIs

June 6, 2023undercommunity

Table of Contents

Some amazing statistics about APIs

Google Receives 5 Billion calls daily
Twitter Receives 13 billion calls daily
Facebook receives 5 billion calls daily
Netflix receives 10 billion calls daily
klout receives 1 billion calls daily
60% of eBay transactions are via their API
50% of salesforce transactions are from APIs
Netflix API allows it to stream over 200 devices
Finance is the top sector where APIs are used at a very large scale
In 2016, Postman had less than half a million collections (collections are essentially folders where API developers group their API requests together). By January 2021, that shot up to over 46 million collections. And Postma has tracked billions of API requests in a single year

Some case studies

API use has increased 13x since 2007

API Friends, a community for those involved with APIs, explains that there are 4 main types of APIS

1-open APIs: open APIs can also be called as Public APIs. As the name implies they are publically available for everyone to use.

2-Partner APIs: Sometimes Companies give limited access of their services to users via some other platforms through integrations

3-Internal APIs: They are also known as private APIs which are used internally within the company

4-Composite APIs: The fourth main type, Composite APIs, can put together multiple streams of data or actions into one API, rather than needing separate APIs for each component

Few things which will get difficult without APIs

With APIs, we get an option to add a like button on your website which can automatically divert your like to that one Facebook post. If APIs were not there then for the same thing we need to instruct users to go to their Facebook then come on our Facebook page and like that particular post

With APIs we can click on the share button and LinkedIn will share that post on our profile but without APIs, we need to copy that post and then we need to post it manually on our profile

Few interesting incidents

Once upon a time during INDIA vs NEW ZEALAND cricket match, Hotstar made a world record where its API was serving live content to 25M people. Hotstar was already prepared for this huge traffic because they did load testing on a priority basis with 108,000 CPUs and 216TB Ram where they were

During Flipkart Big Billion day sale, over 66.6 crore visits were recorded and Flipkart APIs handled 100 orders per second.