Facebook now has more than two billion monthly active users, the social network has revealed.
The figure, cementing the site’s place as one of the most popular web services in the world, comes just 13 years after the platform was created in the Harvard University dormitory of co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg posted: “As of this morning, the Facebook community is now officially 2 billion people! We’re making progress connecting the world, and now let’s bring the world closer together. It’s an honour to be on this journey with you.”
The site, which was initially open only to university students at some schools in the US, reached one million users ten months after its launch by Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin.
By the end of 2016, Facebook had just over 1.86 billion monthly active users, more than a billion of which accessed the site every day.
As well as surpassing the two billion marker, the site has also grown to spawn several other apps and services, including Facebook Messenger, which itself boasts more than a billion active users.
The company has also been involved in some of the biggest tech acquisitions of recent years, having bought photo app Instagram for one billion dollars (£784m) in 2012 and both WhatsApp Messenger and virtual reality firm Oculus in 2014 for 19 billion (£14.8bn) and two billion dollars (£1.5bn) respectively.
The company also launched onto the US stock market in 2012 and has begun the development of solar-powered drones that can be used to broadcast internet signal to remote parts of the world.
However, the social network is today battling issues surrounding the size of its platform, with heavy recent criticism directed at the site over its promotion of fake news stories and an alleged inability to block extreme, violent and illegal content, something the site itself has admitted it “needs to do better” at following a series of high-profile incidents.
The most recent involved a man in the US posting a video of himself to the site shooting and killing an elderly man.
Courtesy Newsrep
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