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Meta history
Meta company history timeline
By March 2004, Facebook expanded availability to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.
Nguyen, Lananh (April 12, 2004). "Online network created by Harvard students flourishes".
Facebook had its first investment in June 2004 from Paul Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal.
By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site.
With the rapid acceptance and obvious business opportunity ahead, Facebook was incorporated in mid-2004.
By the end of 2004, membership was open to nearly all universities in the US and Canada and people were clamouring to sign up.
By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004.
In May 2005 TheFacebook received more money.
"It became Facebook.com in August 2005 after the address was purchased for $200,000.
US high schools could sign up from September 2005, then it began to spread worldwide, reaching UK universities the following month," according to the Guardian.
September 2005 - The site expands to high school networks.
December 2005 - Facebook has more than 6 million users.
In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service.
September 2006 - Anyone can now join Facebook.
December 2006 - Membership increases to 12 million.
In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13.
In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service.
After an outcry from users, Facebook swiftly implemented privacy controls in which users could control what content appeared in News Feed. It first became a serious issue for the company in 2006, when it introduced News Feed, which consisted of every change that a user’s friends had made to their pages.
Denton, Nick (March 7, 2007). "Facebook 'consistently the worst performing site'".Gawker.
Williams, Chris (October 1, 2007). "Facebook wins Manx battle for face-book.com".
The spectre of online predators did little to diminish MySpace’s membership (which reached 70 million active monthly users in 2007), but it did open the door for other social networking sites to seize some of its momentum.
McCarthy, Caroline (May 11, 2008). "As Facebook goes corporate, Mark Zuckerberg loses an early player". CNET.com.
July 2008 - Launch of Facebook for iPhone.
Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the United States presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain.
February 2009 - The "like" button is introduced.
Farmville was released in June, 2009 and, despite being a rip off of a game called Farm Town, became a huge success.
By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook.
July 2010 - Over 500 million users are active on Facebook.
August 2010 - A Facebook engineering center is opened in Seattle.
October 2010 - Groups are launched.
In November, 2010 Facebook was valued at a massive $41bn.
April 2011 - Datacenter opens in Prineville, Oregon.
July 2011 - Video calling is launched.
Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook.
By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company’s revenues.
The Winklevoss twins continue to pursue legal action into 2011.
One of its first major acquisitions was in April 2012, when it acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock.
Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012.
Today, key management personnel consists of Sheryl Sandberg (COO), Chris Cox (VP of Product), and Mark Zuckerberg (Chairman and CEO). As of May 2012, Facebook has over 3,500 employees, and offices in 19 countries.
The stock nonetheless set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline.
On May 22, 2012, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients rather than the general public.
In October 2013, Facebook, Inc. acquired Onavo, an Israeli mobile web analytics company.
In 2013, a year on from the IPO and despite all the troubles it brought, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 at number 462.
Onavo, a VPN tool that allows users to browse the web without your provider knowing where you go (Gizmodo have a good explainer on them here), was bought by Facebook in 2013.
February, 2014 saw Facebooks ten year anniversary.
In February, 2014 Facebook announced they’d be buying WhatsApp for an incredible $19bn.
In February 2014, Facebook, Inc. announced it would buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp for US$19 billion in cash and stock.
March 2014 - Acquisition of Oculus is announced.
November 2014 - Groups App is announced.
In January 2015, they announced a new feature allowing users to flag an article as a ‘false news story’. If this happened enough a note would be added for other users saying the article had been flagged as fake, while their algorithm would also factor in reports.
April 2015 - Over 40 million small business pages are now on Facebook.
Pew found that 51% of people aged between 13 and 17 used Facebook, compared to Pew’s 2015 study.
In April 2016, Facebook announced even more plans to tackle the spread of false information.
October 2016 - Facebook Marketplace launches - allowing users to buy and sell products.
"The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically," Zuckerberg wrote after the 2016 election.
2016 saw them bring in over $10bn in profits (the vast majority through ads), with 1.86bn people logging in every month.
Later that year, Facebook bought Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in stock and cash, which released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016.
April 2017 - F8 developer's conference is held in San Jose by Facebook.
With strong financials bringing in the new year, Facebook first major announcement of 2017 related to journalism (unsurprisingly). In an attempt to position itself as a company that wanted proper journalists to succeed they launched the Facebook Journalism Project.
They took $15.9 in profits for 2017, a 56% increase on the previous year.
In January 2018 Facebook started the year off with a big change: a new algorithm.
March 2018 - Facebook is sued by shareholders, following stock plummet.May 2018 - Facebook trial a new technology to help stop "revenge porn," by asking users to provide naked pictures of themselves.
April 2018 - Zuckerberg testifies before Congress regarding concerns over data and privacy breaches.September 2018 - Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifies before Congress.
On the 25th of July, the platform released their 2018 Q2 earnings report.
October 2018 - Facebook announces the launch of the new Facebook Portal: a hands-free video calling device.
The devices have since gone on sales, becoming available in November 2018.
Their departure comes amid an executive exodus at Facebook in 2018 -- its top lawyer, head of communications, chief security officer, head of news, VP of partnerships, and the founder of WhatsApp all left in 2018.
In 2018, Oculus lead Jason Rubin sent his 50-page vision document titled The Metaverse to Facebook's leadership.
April 2019 - Facebook reportedly set aside billions to cover potential future FTC fines.May 2019 - Facebook deletes large amounts of fake accounts from its site.
June 2019 - Facebook shareholders vote to remove Zuckerberg as Facebook chairman.
June 2019 - Facebook launches its news digital wallet and currency called Calibra.
June 2019 - Facebook begins blocking Huawei from pre-installing its app on their smart devices.
July 2019 - It is announced that Facebook is helping to map roads using deep learning and AI-focussed tools.
In late July 2019, the company announced it was under antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
In late November 2019, Facebook, Inc. announced the acquisition of game developer Beat Games, responsible for developing one of the year's most popular VR titles, Beat Saber.
December 2019 - Facebook announces yet another major security breach.
*Novi was first announced as Calibra in 2019.
In June 2020, Facebook began shedding advertisers, who claimed they no longer wanted their ads to appear next to posts from hate groups.
June 2020 - Companies begin to pull ads from Facebook in a boycott over "hate speech". Facebook stock takes a massive hit.
June 2020 - The company announces its new "Dark Mode" for mobile devices.
Facebook, Inc. announced in November 2020 that it planned to purchase the customer-service platform and chatbot specialist startup Kustomer to promote companies to use their platform for business.
On December 8, 2020, the United States Federal Trade Commission and 46 states (excluding Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota), the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam, launched Federal Trade Commission v.
In 2020, Facebook, Inc. spent $19.7 million on lobbying, hiring 79 lobbyists.
However, in August 2021, UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated that Facebook, Inc. might have to sell Giphy, after an investigation found that the deal between the two companies would harm competition in display advertising market.
Following a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, news started to emerge on October 21, 2021, about Facebook's plan to rebrand the company and to change its name.
The metaverse vision and the name change from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms was introduced at Facebook Connect on October 28, 2021.
In the Q3 2021 Earnings Call, on October 25, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ongoing criticism of the company's social services and the way it operates, and pointed to the pivoting efforts to building the metaverse - without mentioning the rebranding and the name change.
On December 24, 2021, a court in Russia fined Meta for $27 million after the company declined to remove unspecified banned content.
The company also expected measures taken by Apple, Inc. to protect user privacy to cost it some $10 billion in advertisement revenue, an amount equal to roughly 8% of its revenue for 2021.
Hotels, Restaurants, and Travel: Consumer Trends Around Hospitality How is conversation around the hospitality industry changing in 2022?
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Meta competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | $350.0B | 139,995 | 5,374 | |
| IBM | 1911 | $62.8B | 270,000 | 3,452 |
| 2003 | $3.0B | 15,000 | 636 | |
| Bloomberg | 1981 | $10.0B | 20,000 | 745 |
| VMware | 1998 | $13.4B | 31,000 | 1 |
| Uber Technologies | 2009 | $44.0B | 22,800 | 24 |
| 2009 | $3.6B | 1,600 | 194 | |
| Akritiv | 2009 | - | 10,002 | - |
| Xerox | 1906 | $6.2B | 24,700 | 712 |
| Intuit | 1983 | $16.3B | 10,600 | 1,125 |
Meta history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Meta, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Meta. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Meta. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Meta. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Meta and its employees or that of Zippia.
Meta may also be known as or be related to Facebook, Facebook Inc, Facebook, Inc., Meta and Meta Platforms, Inc.