The lockdown is driving people to Facebook

The quarantine lockdown is driving a record number of users to Facebook’s products. On a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed a number of new metrics highlighting a significant bump in Facebook usage during the broader quarantine lockdown.

In the past month, more than 3 billion internet users logged onto a Facebook service, including its central app, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp, Zuckerberg disclosed. This number constitutes roughly two-thirds of the world’s total internet users. This was a record for the platform, which reported average monthly active users of 2.60 billion in Q1.

The company’s communications tools saw major surges in the past several weeks, with Zuckerberg also disclosing more granular metrics that voice and video calling usage had doubled, views on Facebook and Instagram Live videos had doubled and the amount of time on group video calling had surged 1,000% in recent weeks.

The company predicted that usage would settle down once shelter-in-place was discontinued, though Zuckerberg highlighted opportunities Facebook could realize during the lockdown. “When the world changes quickly, people have new needs and that means that there are more things to build,” he said.

Facebook reported its Q1 earnings Wednesday, sharing they had earned revenues of $17.74 billion during the quarter. While the company shared that usage of certain services had surged, they also disclosed that the company had seen a “significant reduction” in the demand for ads at the end of the quarter, sharing that they had seen flat year-over-year growth in the first few weeks of April.

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