Overview
- The overlap occurred Wednesday at about 11:10 GMT when roughly 99 percent of the world’s 8.2 billion people were in full daylight or one of the three twilight stages for about a minute.
- At that instant about 6.9 billion people (roughly 83 percent) were in full daylight, 581 million were in civil twilight, 498 million in nautical twilight, 249 million in astronomical twilight, and about 83 million remained in full night.
- The timing follows the June solstice because the Sun’s slight southward drift after the solstice pushes daylight into more densely populated southern parts of Asia, adding about 10 million people compared with the solstice itself.
- July 8 became a popular date after a viral 2022 post but fact checks by TimeandDate and others show the same near‑global overlap happens daily through an annual window from about May 18 to July 17.
- How the headline reads depends on definitions: counting all twilight yields about 99 percent while counting only full daylight gives about 83 percent, and the phenomenon is extremely brief with remaining darkness concentrated over oceans and sparsely populated regions.