this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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447
Meta Is Dying. It’s About Time. (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 23 hours ago by mysticpickle@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 21 points 10 hours ago (3 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 2 points 48 minutes ago

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.

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 1 points 3 hours ago

Might be boomers dying off, and young people won't use Facebook because it's not cool to have an account there?

[–] queueBenSis@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

the pessimism in me suspects they’ll just get a cushy bailout from the government later. SOCIALIST CAPITALISM - when the government only cares about corporations and not people

[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 3 points 6 hours ago

That's just capitalism. But yeah, they can just bailout since the concept of separate legal entities means that individual investors aren't held responsible for corporate losses.