Meta's daily user count just dropped for the first time ever
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingDaily active users across Meta's properties slipped from 3.58 billion to 3.56 billion last quarter, the first decline the company has ever reported. Julia Angwin, writing in a New York Times opinion piece, says Meta has caught the same stink that AOL did in 2003 and that Yahoo did in 2015. She calls this the start of Meta's zombie era.
Mark Zuckerberg burned $80 billion on the Metaverse from 2021 to 2026, trying to get users into headsets to hang out as legless avatars. He shut that down, then spent roughly $100 billion on an open-source AI model so unwieldy that almost nobody could run it. He scrapped that too and has told investors that Meta will spend at least another $115 billion on AI next year on a system that currently performs worse than its rivals.
To pay for it, Meta has been borrowing. Long-term debt closed out 2025 at $59 billion, twice the prior year's figure, and that excludes the $27 billion data center Meta is putting up in Louisiana, which the company has kept off its balance sheet through what Angwin calls "aggressive" accounting. The Wall Street Journal's Asa Fitch wrote this week that the spending no longer looks sustainable.
Meanwhile, the cash cow is being squeezed. Through Q1 of this year, Meta crammed more ads into its feeds and raised its ad rates, lifting revenue per user by 27 percent in a single quarter. In March, Meta and YouTube lost a lawsuit brought by a teenager who blamed their addictive design for her anxiety and depression, with 100,000 similar cases waiting behind it.
Angwin's bet is that Meta won't go quietly. She thinks it will spend its slow-fade years cutting safety staff, letting deepfakes and scams metastasize, and pushing $500 smart glasses on a public that finds them creepy.
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