Meta controls several of the most widely used social networks in the world, and its power and reach, far from leveling off, continue to grow. This is reflected in the latest user data shared by the company, which reveals that Meta’s family of platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, and WhatsApp) now has an average of 3.580 billion daily active people (DAP).
This figure appears in its first-quarter 2026 earnings report. If you want to learn more about its financial results, we cover them in this other article 😉
If we compare the current 3.560 billion users with the 3.430 billion recorded in the same period of 2025, we can see that Meta achieved a year-over-year increase of 3.8%.
However, for the first time in several quarters, the growth curve experienced a slight decline of 0.56% compared with Q4 2025. Meta has been very clear about the reasons behind this drop: it was not caused by a lack of interest, but by technical blocks. Internet outages in Iran and restrictions on access to WhatsApp in Russia were the main drivers of this temporary decline. As Zuckerberg explained: “We saw a small decline in total family daily actives due to internet shutdowns in Iran and blocks in Russia, but otherwise, trends across our apps remain solid.”
Evolution of Meta user base Evolution of Meta’s user base
Meta has not shared the exact breakdown of daily active users by social network, so it is not possible to know how activity is specifically distributed across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp individually. What we do know, approximately, according to Mark Zuckerberg: “daily and monthly actives on Instagram and Facebook continue to grow.”
If you are wondering how adding up the figures for each individual social network can produce a number higher than Meta’s total daily figure (those 3.560 billion), do not worry. It comes down to the company’s complicated way of presenting its results. Many of those millions of people use multiple apps on the same day. For example:
If you added up the users of each app independently, the figure would come out to nearly 6 billion, but since almost everyone who uses Instagram also uses WhatsApp or Facebook, the real number of unique users falls to those 3.5 billion.
On the other hand, we can infer that Threads is playing a meaningful role in this growth.
According to Similarweb data, by the end of 2025 Threads had surpassed the threshold of 145 million daily active users (45 million more than in December 2024). Threads’ strong growth figures make sense given that it is the youngest member of the family (it will turn 3 in 2026) and, most likely, they are helping offset the natural “plateau” of more established platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, which have much less room left for growth.
Photo: Canva
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