Facebook Reaches 3.2 Billion People Each Month

Across its family of apps, Facebook now has 3.5 billion “monthly active people”, which it defines as “as a registered and logged-in user of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp who visited at least one of these Family products through a mobile device application or using a web or mobile browser in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.” Yesterday, a lot of these people were left out in the rain as Facebook platforms experienced the biggest outage in many years, being at least partially unresponsive for around six hours.

Facebook started reporting the family products metric in 2019 and hasn’t publicly shared new user data for Messenger or Instagram since 2017 and 2018, respectively. The last official release for WhatsApp happened in Q1 of 2020, when the platform hit two billion users. Based on Instagram advertising data released in July, the number of Instagram's monthly active users could be closer to 1.4 billion at the moment. 

The following chart shows the latest available information on how many people use each of Facebook’s social networking/messaging tools, with the company’s namesake platform still the undisputed number one in terms of monthly active users.