Facebook Preparing To Announce 500 Million Users


Facebook is about to announce that they’ve hit 500 million users — a milestone that cements (as if it hadn’t already) the site’s status as one of the web’s biggest successes ever. Of course, at Facebook’s growth trajectory it hasn’t been a matter of if the social network would be hitting 500 million, but when it would (in fact, the movie poster for the upcoming movie The Social Network uses the 500 million stat in its tagline). Still, it’s finally about to become official. So how do we know?

As part of its celebration, Facebook is apparently asking many of its employees to upload photos of themselves celebrating and giving thanks to users. And all of those photos are being hosted on one Drop.io account. In the interest of not totally raining on their parade I’ll hold off on sharing all the photos (Facebook will undoubtedly make the Drop.io folder private anyway), but we’ve included a couple of them.

Facebook’s announced 400 million users only five months ago, as it celebrated its sixth birthday. And it took only five months to go from 300 to 400.