60 Fun Facts About Facebook

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

He launched the site from his dorm room on February 4, 2004, with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes helping run it.

In which year did the site that became Facebook first go live?

It launched as a students-only directory and only opened to the general public two and a half years later.

What was the site called when it launched in February 2004?

The company dropped the definite article the following year after buying the shorter domain name.

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?

The deal, paid in cash and stock, closed only weeks before Facebook's own stock market debut.

Which messaging app did Facebook agree to buy in February 2014, in its biggest-ever acquisition?

It was the most ever paid for a venture-capital-backed startup at the time.

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

The headset maker's technology later became the basis of the Quest line and the company's metaverse push.

Why is blue Facebook's primary colour?

He only found out he was colourblind from a test taken around 2007, by which time the palette was set.

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

It was extended to comments in June 2010 and became the basis for Reactions six years later.

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

It joined the original five Reactions of Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry introduced in 2016.

Which 2010 film dramatised the founding of Facebook?

It won three Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Aaron Sorkin.

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

He and Zuckerberg finally met on Saturday Night Live in January 2011, when Zuckerberg made a surprise cameo.

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

South Korea, Spain and Quebec are exceptions, where the minimum is a year higher.

Facebook Stories disappear after how many hours?

The format copied Snapchat's, and was first rolled out on iOS and Android in one small European country in 2017.

In which California city is Facebook's headquarters?

The company moved there in 2011 onto a former Sun Microsystems campus.

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

He built it in less than a week using photos lifted from house directories, and the university took it down within days.

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

His $500,001 angel cheque bought 10.2 percent of the company and a board seat.

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

He had been informally advising Zuckerberg and helped steer the company to Silicon Valley and its first investors.

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

The move west put the young company next door to the venture capitalists who would soon fund it.

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

The company was valued at $104 billion, the largest ever for a newly public company at that point, and the stock closed its first day just 23 cents above the offer price.

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

The botched opening triggered a regulatory investigation and a class action from angry investors.

Microsoft's 2007 purchase of a 1.6% stake for $240m implied what valuation for Facebook?

The deal also gave Microsoft rights to place international advertisements on the site.

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

Her brainstorming sessions with staff settled the question of how the site would make money: advertising.

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

The domain belonged to AboutFace Corporation, and buying it let the company drop 'The' from its name.

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

Facebook was granted a patent on aspects of the News Feed in February 2010.

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

It grew out of the company's struggle to scale PHP, and much of the site was already running on it before the public release.

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

The 'Meta' trademark had belonged to a scientific-literature analysis company owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which handed the name over.

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

It had passed the one-billion mark in October 2012, five years earlier.

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

It was the largest penalty ever imposed on a company for violating consumer privacy, and came with a 20-year settlement order.

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

Only about 270,000 people had actually used the quiz app; 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?

That was the same year Facebook passed half a billion 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?

He argued 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?

They went to the student newspaper just six days after the site 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 company famously kept the old owner's sign at the entrance, just turned around.

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

The programme promised not to pursue 'white hat' hackers, and drew heavy participation from researchers in 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?

The service let users pull posts from Instagram into their dating profile, and its 2018 announcement knocked 22% off Match Group's shares.

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

The small market served as the test bed before the Snapchat-style feature rolled out worldwide.

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

It piggybacked on Instagram accounts, which let it sign up tens of millions of users in its first days.

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

It was made available for commercial use through cloud partners such as Microsoft rather than sold as a service.

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

The watchdog also fined the company $70 million for deliberately failing to report on the deal while it was under investigation.

In which New York town was Zuckerberg born?

His father was a dentist and his mother a psychiatrist; he grew up with three sisters in nearby Dobbs Ferry.

What did 11-year-old Zuckerberg call the program linking his home computers to his father's dental office?

He later built a music player called Synapse in high school that drew interest from AOL and Microsoft.

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

The site was first shared on that house's mailing list, and had over a thousand registrations within 24 hours.

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

He said what drew him was not Facebook but themes 'as old as storytelling': friendship, loyalty, jealousy, class and power.

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?

The Nine Inch Nails frontman and his collaborator released the soundtrack on their own Null Corporation label.

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

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?

It arrived 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?

It replaced the phone's home screen with a feed of friends' posts, and was quietly abandoned within a year.

Which rival's traffic was Facebook's 2016 'Project Ghostbusters' built to intercept and analyse?

Documents released by a California court in 2024 showed the company used its Onavo tool for man-in-the-middle attacks on the encrypted traffic.

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

Media outlets had classified the app as spyware; the data it collected on rivals had helped motivate the WhatsApp purchase.

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

Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber were reported as early backers before most of them walked away.

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

Moskovitz, McCollum and Hughes joined soon after to help manage the site's rapid growth across US and Canadian universities.

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

It was also the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s and, by 2025, the world's third-most-visited website.

In which month and year did Facebook's monthly active users first pass one billion?

At that point 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?

Stories, borrowing the Snapchat format, followed in Ireland in January 2017 and vanish after 24 hours.

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

India's telecom regulator banned it in 2016 after a fierce net-neutrality backlash, though Zuckerberg claimed it had connected almost 100 million people by 2018.

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

Facebook responded by planning legal action against the government for suppressing freedom of expression.