AT&T just revealed which holidays get the most calls. And no, it’s not Christmas.

The holidays are an opportunity to connect with friends and family, either by gathering in person or checking in remotely. So, naturally, you might think phone calls would be at their peak during the end-of-year festive period. But according to new numbers shared with CNET by AT&T, another holiday received the highest number of calls in 2025. Which one?

The answer might give you chills: AT&T subscribers reported approximately 651 million phone calls on… Halloween. The company didn’t share any data other than the massive number, which made me wonder why the spooky season inspired so many calls. Lost candy calling their parents for rides? People dressed up at parties accidentally calling their friends? Poltergeists stealing people’s phones? Only spirits really know.

Despite this volume of calls in a day, text messages are far more popular than phone calls throughout the year. Until December 9, 2025, the network recorded almost three times more SMS messages than calls: 525 billion SMS messages sent compared to 181 billion calls made during the year.

And the best day for texting? December 1, 2025, with approximately 2.3 billion (more precisely 2,264,041,461) messages sent.

These numbers represent traffic on AT&T’s mobile network, which does not include its home or business broadband services. And of course, this is an overview of a single provider. AT&T has approximately 119 million subscribers, according to Wikipedia.

When you look phone planseven unlimited phone plansusing tens of gigabytes of data for a month seems like a lot. But at the network level, the scale is staggering, even in limited areas.

For example, AT&T also released its three largest data events in 2025: Mardi Gras (March 4) recorded 57.5 terabytes; South-by-Southwest (SXSW) (March 7-15) reached 34.1 terabytes; and the Miami Formula 1 Grand Prix (May 4) burned 24 terabytes. (A terabyte is roughly 1,000 gigabytes.)

Overall, across all of AT&T’s networks (mobile, broadband, and enterprise), the company reported an average data traffic of 1 exabyte per day. That’s 1 million terabytes.

With a massive communications infrastructure built over the past several decades by AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and others, we’re probably long gone from the days when phone networks were clogged with the influx of calls on Christmas Day.

So make sure to call your family this holiday, or at least send a text. The network should be able to handle it.