Facebook loses users and money

It may be surprising to most people to hear that Facebook loses users for the first time of its existence. This in itself would not normally be a problem, but it is also going through the worse drop in share price in US stock market history.

In the space of just one day, Facebook lost all gains that it made in the last 12 months. The dollar value assigned to this is US$230 billion. That is 26 times the annual national budget of a country like Trinidad and Tobago. The question is why?

Facebook loses users but may resume growth

Facebook still gets at least 2 billion daily log ins, and is still the “go to” platform for businesses both large and small. The drop in net users is based on the first quarter of 2022.

Facebook’s intent is to connect everyone to the internet, including those who currently do not have access. Even though Facebook loses users, in some corners of the world, Facebook is “the internet”.

While this loss in daily active users may seem like the beginning of the end of Facebook, it is also likely that Facebook would resume its growth in the future.

Roller coaster ride for Facebook

The last 12 months have been a roller coaster ride for Facebook. Late last year, it was accused of tampering with the algorithm, censorship and suffered a global outage. The share price started the day at US$335.50 and ended at US$326.23, according to Yahoo Finance. This equated to a total loss of 7 billion US dollars for a 7-hour outage.

The whistleblower allegations inadvertently revived the #deleteFacebook. All this just as everyone kind of forgot or recovered from the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

Trend with tech giants

You may still be wondering why has Facebook use seem to be dropping and how it would affect you. For the average user this news would generally mean nothing.

An investor who owns shares in Facebook may be a bit worried, but due the volatile nature of speculative the stock market, this is just a normal Thursday. This did happen to Facebook before, in July 2018 as a matter of fact. Facebook lost US$118 billion. This seems to be a trend with tech giants, just after a round of bad news and then they seem to recover.

The list of the largest single day declines in market value are,

Meta Platforms (Formally Facebook) February 3^rd, 2022 – US$232,000,000,000

Amazon.com February 3^rd, 2022 – US$119,400,000,000

Tesla November 9^th, 2021 – US$140,000,000,000

Apple September 3^rd, 2021 – US$184,000,000,000

Amazon.com July 30^th, 2021 – US$137,900,000,000

Apple September 8^th, 2020 – US$141,100,000,000

Microsoft March 16^th, 2020 – US$178,000,000,000

Apple March 16^th, 2020 – US$156,500,000,000

Apple March 12^th, 2020 – US$119,000,000,000

Facebook July 26^th, 2018 – US$119,200,000,000

When these large declines happen, they affect the entire market, pulling down the stock prices of not only subsidiaries but other companies in the technology space. Amazon, Pinterest, Twitter, Spotify and Snap Chat stocks were just a few of the stocks affected. As a matter of fact, the entire market saw a decline of at least 1.4 percent.

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Not the end of Facebook

Although Facebook loses users, it is doubtful that this is the beginning of the end of Facebook. What is evident is that the declines are happening more frequently and are getting larger, all due to negative speculation.

At some point, it would not be contained only to the tech industry, but will spill over into other industries. These “too big to fail” still fail occasionally and as in 2008 whose industries are affected and could lead to a global recession.

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