Meta Shares Plunge 20% as Facebook Reports Losing Daily Users for the First Time

Meta, the parent company of the social media giant Facebook, saw its shares plunge in the after-hours trading session. This comes as the company released its Q4 2021 report.

• Meta, formerly-known as Facebook, posted its Q4 financial report on Wednesday, and the results came short of analysts’ expectations.
• Facebook’s global daily active users decreased from the previous quarter for the very first time – to 1.929 billion from 1.930 billion.
• The company also revealed that it faced certain challenges from Apple Inc’s privacy changes to its operating systems.
• Supposedly, this made it harder to target and measure the ads posted on Instagram and Facebook. Additionally, the company also cited macroeconomic issues.
• This resulted in a massive plunge in Meta’s share value, currently down 22% in the after-hours trading session, evaporating over $200 billion of its market value.
• It’s also worth noting that this is the first quarter after the company moved to rebrand to Meta and focus on the metaverse concept.
• In 2021, CEO and co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, revealed that they spent $10 billion on the above efforts.
• Commenting on the matter, the high-ranked executive said:

We had a solid quarter as people turned to our products to stay connected and businesses continued to use our services to grow. I’m encouraged by the progress we made this past year in a number of important areas like Reels, commerce, and virtual reality, and we’ll continue investigating in these and other key priorities in 2022 as we work towards building the metaverse.