Source: Statista

We’ve been hearing variations of the same story for years: “Facebook is no longer cool”, “people are leaving Facebook behind”, “teenagers are over Facebook”, and so on and so forth. And yet, the world’s largest social network continued to grow, adding nearly 600 million monthly active users over the past three years alone. Until now that is. According to its latest earnings release, Facebook‘s monthly active users declined by two million in the second quarter of 2022, a first in the platform’s 18-year history. And while the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed the decline to “internet blocks related to the war in Ukraine”, it is in line with the broader trend as our chart shows.

In Q2 2022, Facebook had 2,934 million monthly active users, down from 2,936 million in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, the number of daily active users climbed from 1,960 million in Q1 2022 to 1,968 million in the three months ended June 2022. Looking at year-over-year growth, both monthly and daily active users follow a similar downward trend and are now in the low single digits.

So have we officially reached “Peak Facebook”? For now it’s too early to tell, but if the trend continues in the next quarter, it would be an ominous sign, suggesting that all the surveys pointing towards declining Facebook usage may have had a point after all.