SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook’s parent firm Meta on Wednesday delivered a gloomy mix of a sharper-than-expected drop in profit, a decrease in users and threats to its ad business that plunged shares some 22% in after-hours trading.
Already jittery markets have punished pandemic-era darlings including Netflix for disappointing results, with Meta getting a taste of that after its $10.3-billion quarterly profit and daily user-growth fell short of expectations.
Yet the signature Facebook platform also reported losing roughly 1 million daily users globally between the last two quarters of 2021 — a tiny number on an app with nearly 2 billion daily users, but a potentially worrying signal of stagnation.
CFO Dave Weiner told analysts that user growth…
