this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
527 points (94.9% liked)

Technology

88236 readers
4467 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
527
Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 4 months ago by mysticpickle@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
116 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.

Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 25 points 4 months ago (5 children)

3.58 to 3.56 billion isn't really significant because in the long term these sort of mega corporations can easily recover that many users.

But I like they're getting covered in debt, though idk how far it is from collapse as these numbers don't make much sense to me.

[–] CumbrianCucumber@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, I think it's massively significant. For a start off, that's 20 million people, the population of Chile, in one quarter. That's a lot of people regardless of how you slice it.

But more to the point, Meta services - Facebook especially - have reached a point of cultural impact where anyone who doesn't have them can't be talked into getting them anyway. Plus, they're useful messaging services too, because everyone else uses them. Their popularity has become self-fulfilling. The idea of Meta losing more users than it's gaining at all has been frankly unthinkable until recently.

[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

It's a lot of people but big tech can easily get back those numbers.

Let's see how the tendency unrolls over the long-term.

load more comments (3 replies)