The holidays are a time for connecting with friends and family, either by gathering in person or checking in remotely. So, naturally, you might think phone calls would be at their highest during the festive stretch at the end of the year. But according to new figures shared with by AT&T, another holiday got the highest number of calls in 2025. Which one?
The answer might give you chills: AT&T’s subscribers conjured up around 651 million phone calls on… Halloween. The company shared no other data besides the massive number, leading me to wonder why the spooky season inspired so many calls. Lost trick-or-treaters calling their parents for rides? People in costumes at parties accidentally butt-dialing their friends? Poltergeists pilfering people’s phones? Only the spirits truly know.
Despite that one-day call volume, texting is vastly more popular than phone calls over the course of the year. Through Dec. 9, 2025, the network registered almost three times more texts than calls: 525 billion texts sent vs. 181 billion calls made during the year.
And the top texting day? Dec. 1, 2025, with around 2.3 billion (specifically 2,264,041,461) messages sent.
These figures represent traffic on AT&T’s mobile network, which does not include its home or business broadband services. And, of course, it’s a snapshot of just one provider. AT&T has around 119 million subscribers, according to Wikipedia.
When you’re looking at phone plans, even unlimited phone plans, using tens of gigabytes of data during a month sounds like a lot. But at the network level, the scale is staggering, even in limited areas.
For example, AT&T also broke out its three largest data events in 2025: Mardi Gras (March 4) logged 57.5 terabytes; South-by-Southwest (SXSW) (March 7 to 15) went through 34.1 terabytes; and the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix (May 4) burned 24 terabytes. (One terabyte is roughly equal to 1,000 gigabytes.)
Overall, across all of AT&T’s networks — mobile, broadband and enterprise — the company reported average data traffic of 1 exabyte per day. That’s 1 million terabytes.
With massive communications infrastructure built over the last few decades by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and others, we’re likely long past the days of phone networks getting clogged by the surge of calls on Christmas Day.
So make a point of calling your family this holiday, or at least send a text. The network should be able to handle it.
