Ask HN: Facebook messenger data spike

I occasionally use Facebook messenger to send the odd text based message, it's convenient as lots of my friends have an account. Yesterday when not using my phone I got an alert saying that I was out of my data limit. On checking settings it appeared that messenger had used around 3gig of data almost instantaneously. Fortunate that the carrier had a hard limit set. I've tidied up the permissions and background data usage on my apps as well as updating messenger (I may stop using entirely).

Looking online this seems to be a not uncommon occurrence. This did raise the question - I can't see Facebook caring about this too much and it's not really the carriers fault so in the world of picking and choosing apps from different providers what can you do?

If anyone with a better knowledge of what messenger is doing in the background wants to comment on the issue, please feel free to comment.