Meta this week revealed its fourth-quarter results for 2021. News of the company’s performance sent its stock into the toilet — relatively speaking. Losing 20% of the value of anything is rather severe, but there’s still plenty of value left out. Facebook’s user performance in particular was to blame for some of the company’s stock issues.

The other part might be Meta’s metaverse ambitions. Reality Labs, the internal division exploring the metaverse for Meta, cost the company $10 billion in 2021. That’s a fair sum of money to throw at a future that is far from certain, despite being such a buzzy buzzword that it can basically talk to bees.

Facebook starts fading

But it’s Facebook’s user performance that kicked the company’s share price in the goolies. Since its inception, the social network has experienced user growth in every quarter. Unless, that is, this last one.

For the first time ever, Facebook’s daily user number experienced a drop over a quarter. More than a million users in North America, the company’s moneymaking advertising market, jumped ship in Q4 2021. This, paired with a lack of user growth across Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram globally, saw the company’s daily user figures fall.

It’s important to note that the social network’s user numbers are so large that this dip is largely insignificant. Daily users fell from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion. But it’s the first concrete sign that Facebook user retention may be in a bit of trouble. Still, the statistical hiccup was enough to spook investors and stockholders into wiping off $200 billion of Meta’s value in less than a day.

Make no mistake, the social network and its associated divisions still make money. But Facebook in particular has had issues when it comes to attracting new and younger users for some time now. It may have finally come to a head. Meta’s push into the so-called metaverse and virtual reality might offset these losses, or maybe the network that started it all is about to start bleeding more users.

Source: The Verge