Facebook has passed the 2 billion users milestone, double the number of monthly active users from five years ago, the company’s CEO said Tuesday.
MENLO PARK — Facebook has passed the 2 billion users milestone, doubling the number of users in just five years, the company’s top executive said Tuesday.
The social media giant reached the 1 billion mark for monthly active users in October 2012, a few months after it went public.
“As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people!” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive officer and co-founder, stated Tuesday in a Facebook post.
Menlo Park-based Facebook had reached 1.94 billion monthly active users by the end of March, the company reported in its quarterly financial results, so the increase to 2 billion was highly anticipated.
“It’s an impressive and unprecedented milestone, but also predictable, ” said Ben Bajarin, a principal analyst with Campbell-based Creative Strategies, a market researcher that tracks the technology sector. “We saw it coming because they are growing so rapidly.”
On Tuesday, Facebook’s shares fell 2 percent and closed at $150.58, as the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.6 percent.
However, so far in 2017, the social network’s stock is up 30.9 percent. Facebook’s performance this year has far outstripped the S&P 500 Index, up 8.1 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite Index, up 14.2 percent.
“We’ re making progress connecting the world, ” Zuckerberg stated in the blog post. “Now let’s bring the world closer together.”
