58 Fun Facts About Facebook

Who founded Facebook in 2004, together with his college roommates?

Mark Zuckerberg launched the site from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004, with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes as co-founders.

Which company has owned Facebook since the parent firm renamed itself in 2021?

The new name signalled a shift toward building the so-called metaverse with virtual and augmented reality.

Which photo-sharing app did Facebook buy in April 2012, paying in cash and stock?

Facebook announced the $1 billion Instagram deal on April 9, 2012, about six weeks before its own stock market debut; it closed that September after regulatory clearance.

Which messaging app did Facebook agree to buy for about $19 billion in February 2014?

WhatsApp cost about $19 billion in cash and stock (around $22 billion by closing), then the most ever paid for a venture-backed startup.

Which virtual-reality startup did Facebook buy in March 2014?

Oculus VR, maker of the Rift headset, was bought for about $2 billion; its technology became the basis of the Quest line and the company's metaverse push.

Why is blue Facebook's primary colour?

Zuckerberg is red-green colourblind and told The New Yorker in 2010 that 'blue is the richest colour for me, I can see all of blue', so the site's palette was built around it.

In which year was the thumbs-up 'like' button first enabled?

The Like button went live on February 9, 2009; it was extended to comments in June 2010 and became the basis for Reactions in February 2016.

Which reaction was added in April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The Care reaction, a face hugging a heart, launched in April 2020 as a way to show support during the pandemic; it joined Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry, introduced in February 2016.

Which 2010 film dramatised the founding of Facebook?

The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, won three Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Film Editing.

Who played Zuckerberg in the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Jesse Eisenberg was Oscar-nominated for the role; he and Zuckerberg finally met on Saturday Night Live in January 2011, when Zuckerberg made a surprise cameo during Eisenberg's hosting stint.

Since 2006, what is the minimum age to register for a Facebook account in most countries?

The minimum age is 13, matching the US COPPA law; in a few places such as South Korea, Spain and Quebec the threshold is 14.

Facebook Stories disappear after how many hours?

Like the Snapchat format it copied, Facebook Stories vanish after 24 hours; the feature was tested in a single country in January 2017 before a global rollout that March.

In which California city is Facebook's headquarters?

Facebook moved to Menlo Park in 2011, taking over a former tech campus at 1 Hacker Way that it has since expanded with Frank Gehry-designed buildings.

What was the name of the 2003 site Zuckerberg built to rate students' attractiveness?

Facemash, launched in October 2003, paired photos lifted from house directories and asked which student was hotter; Harvard shut it down within days and disciplined Zuckerberg.

Which venture capitalist made Facebook's first outside investment in 2004?

Peter Thiel's $500,000 angel investment in August 2004 bought 10.2 percent of the company and a board seat.

Which Napster co-founder became Facebook's president in 2004?

Sean Parker, who had co-founded Napster with Shawn Fanning, became president in 2004 after informally advising Zuckerberg, and steered the company to Silicon Valley and its first investors.

To which city did Facebook move its base of operations in June 2004?

Zuckerberg and colleagues moved to a rented house in Palo Alto in June 2004, putting the company next to the Silicon Valley investors who would soon fund it.

Facebook's shares were priced at what level for its May 2012 IPO?

The offer price was $38, valuing Facebook at $104 billion, the largest valuation ever for a newly public US company at that point; the stock closed its first day at $38.23.

Technical problems on which exchange delayed the start of trading in Facebook stock on its first day?

Nasdaq's systems failed to confirm orders for hours on May 18, 2012; the botched opening brought the exchange a $10 million SEC penalty and a class action from investors.

What valuation did Microsoft's 2007 purchase of a $240 million stake imply for Facebook?

The $240 million bought 1.6% and implied a $15 billion valuation; the deal also gave Microsoft rights to sell international advertising on the site.

Who became Facebook's chief operating officer in March 2008?

Sheryl Sandberg left Google to become COO in March 2008; her brainstorming sessions with staff settled how the site would make money: advertising.

How much did the company pay for the facebook.com domain in 2005?

The company paid $200,000 to AboutFace Corporation for facebook.com in 2005, which let it drop 'The' from its name.

What was the name of the algorithm that governed the sorting of stories in the News Feed?

EdgeRank weighed affinity, edge weight and time decay to rank News Feed stories; it was presented at the f8 conference in 2010 and later replaced by machine-learning models.

What did Facebook call the open-source programming language it announced in March 2014?

Hack, a PHP-derived language running on Facebook's HHVM virtual machine, grew out of the struggle to scale PHP; much of the site already ran on it before the March 2014 release.

At which event on October 28, 2021 was the company's rename to Meta announced?

The rename was announced at the Facebook Connect conference on October 28, 2021; the company later paid Meta Financial Group about $60 million for rights to the Meta name.

In which year did Facebook's monthly active users pass the 2bn mark?

Facebook announced 2 billion monthly active users on June 27, 2017, when Zuckerberg posted that the community was 'now officially 2 billion people'.

How large was the fine the FTC imposed on Facebook in July 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica affair?

The FTC's $5 billion penalty was then the largest ever imposed for violating consumer privacy, and came with a 20-year settlement order requiring new privacy oversight.

Roughly how many Facebook users had their information sold to Cambridge Analytica?

Facebook said up to 87 million users were affected; only about 270,000 people had used Aleksandr Kogan's quiz app, and the rest were their friends, harvested through Facebook's API.

Which company held serious talks to buy Facebook in September 2006, with prices reaching $1bn?

Zuckerberg turned it down; the company's own internal valuation was said to be around $8 billion.

In which year was Zuckerberg named Time magazine's Person of the Year?

Time named Zuckerberg Person of the Year in 2010, the year Facebook passed 500 million users and The Social Network hit cinemas.

Which Facebook co-founder wrote a 2019 New York Times op-ed calling for the company to be broken up?

Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate and co-founder, argued in May 2019 that Zuckerberg's power was 'unprecedented and un-American' and that the company had become a monopoly.

The Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for which rival site?

HarvardConnection, later renamed ConnectU, was the site they had hired Zuckerberg to code; they complained to the Harvard Crimson six days after TheFacebook launched, and the dispute became the spine of The Social Network.

Facebook's 2011 headquarters move was onto the former campus of which company?

The 1 Hacker Way campus had belonged to Sun Microsystems; Facebook kept Sun's old sign at the entrance, turned around so the back faced visitors, as a reminder of what happens to companies that stop innovating.

What was the minimum payout when Facebook launched its Bug Bounty Program in 2011?

The minimum reward was $500 with no fixed maximum; the programme promised not to pursue 'white hat' researchers who reported responsibly, and drew heavy participation from India and Russia.

What caused the October 4, 2021 outage that took every Facebook-owned app offline for hours?

Because the DNS servers were all self-hosted, employees were locked out of internal tools too, and roughly three billion users were affected.

In which year did Facebook Dating launch in the United States?

Facebook Dating reached the United States in September 2019, a year after launching in Colombia; the 2018 announcement knocked 22% off Match Group's shares.

Facebook Stories were first launched in January 2017 in which country?

Ireland served as the test market in January 2017 before the Snapchat-style feature rolled out worldwide in March.

Which text-based app did the company launch on July 6, 2023 as a competitor to Twitter?

Threads piggybacked on Instagram accounts, which let it sign up 100 million users in under five days.

What is the company's family of large language models, whose second version arrived in July 2023?

Llama 2 was released in July 2023 under a licence allowing commercial use, with Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud partner, rather than being sold as a hosted service.

Which regulator ordered the unwinding of Facebook's 2020 purchase of GIF platform Giphy?

The UK Competition and Markets Authority ordered the sale in 2021 and confirmed it in 2022 after an appeal; it also fined the company £50.5 million (about $70 million) for deliberately failing to report on the deal while under investigation.

In which New York town was Zuckerberg born?

Zuckerberg was born in White Plains on May 14, 1984, to a dentist father and a psychiatrist mother, and grew up with three sisters in nearby Dobbs Ferry.

What did young Zuckerberg call the program linking his home computers to his father's dental office?

ZuckNet let the family's computers message his father's dental office, a home-made precursor of instant messaging; in high school he later built a music player called Synapse that drew interest from AOL and Microsoft.

In which of Harvard's residential houses did Zuckerberg live when he built the site?

Zuckerberg's Kirkland House suite was the site's first home; he announced it on the Kirkland mailing list and it had over a thousand registrations within 24 hours.

Who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Aaron Sorkin said what drew him was not Facebook but themes 'as old as storytelling': friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class and power; he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2011.

The 2010 Facebook film was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires, a book by which author?

Co-founder Eduardo Saverin later said the film 'was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary'.

Which duo composed the score for the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman, and Atticus Ross released the soundtrack on their own Null Corporation label and won the Oscar for Best Original Score.

Under what name did the company's instant messaging service begin in 2008?

Facebook Chat launched in April 2008 as a browser-based instant messenger; it became the standalone Messenger app in August 2011 while remaining part of the website.

Messenger Rooms, launched in April 2020, let users video chat with up to how many people at once?

Messenger Rooms allowed up to 50 participants with no time limit, arriving during the pandemic as a direct answer to Zoom's sudden popularity.

Facebook Home, unveiled in April 2013, was a user-interface layer for which operating system?

Facebook Home ran on Android, replacing the phone's home screen with a feed of friends' posts; it shipped on the HTC First and was quietly abandoned within a year.

Which rival's encrypted traffic did Facebook's secret 2016 Onavo project intercept and analyse?

Snapchat was the target of 'Project Ghostbusters', named for its ghost logo; documents unsealed by a California court in 2024 showed Facebook used its Onavo tool for man-in-the-middle interception.

Pressure from which company led Facebook to pull its Onavo Protect VPN app in August 2018?

Apple said Onavo Protect violated its App Store data-collection rules and Facebook withdrew it; the app's data on rival usage had helped motivate the WhatsApp purchase.

What was the name of the stablecoin cryptocurrency project Facebook founded in 2019?

Libra was announced in June 2019 with Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber among its backers; most walked away within months, and it was renamed Diem before being wound down in 2022.

Which Harvard student agreed to match Zuckerberg's $1,000 investment before TheFacebook launched in 2004?

Eduardo Saverin, a Harvard economics student, put in $1,000 to match Zuckerberg's and became the first CFO; Moskovitz, McCollum and Hughes joined soon after to manage the site's rapid growth.

How many monthly active users did Facebook report as of December 2023?

Meta reported about 3.07 billion monthly active users for December 2023, the last quarter it gave a Facebook-only figure; Facebook was also the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

In which month and year did Facebook announce it had passed one billion monthly users?

Facebook announced on October 4, 2012 that it had passed one billion monthly users (reached on September 14); it counted 600 million mobile users, 219 billion photo uploads and 140 billion friend connections.

What did Facebook launch in May 2015 to let people read news stories without leaving the site?

Instant Articles loaded publishers' stories inside the Facebook app, launching in May 2015 with partners including The New York Times, BuzzFeed and the BBC; it was wound down in 2023.

Facebook's Internet.org initiative, founded in 2013, offered a low-bandwidth service under what name?

Free Basics offered a stripped-down set of sites without data charges; India's telecom regulator effectively banned it in February 2016 after a net-neutrality backlash, though Zuckerberg claimed the initiative had connected almost 100 million people by 2018.

In 2020, which government forced Facebook to remove the million-member 'Royalist Marketplace' group?

Thailand's government ordered Facebook to restrict access to the Royalist Marketplace group, run by exiled academic Pavin Chachavalpongpun, in August 2020; Facebook complied but said it would challenge the order in court.