Wednesday 25 May 2022 07:19 PM Peter Thiel is stepping down from Meta's board trends now Facebook's devastating earnings report marked the end of a difficult year for the company, which has been battered by whistleblower allegations, a major global service outage, and protests and controversy over its policies. Facebook reported on Wednesday that daily logins to its services dropped nearly 500,000 during the last three months of 2021, the first time in the company's 18-year history that user activity has declined. It sent Facebook shares plunging 26 percent as of Thursday when the markets closed, wiping more than $230 billion off the company's market cap and erasing at least $29 billion from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's net worth. Zuckerberg blamed the dismal performance on Apple's privacy changes and increased competition from services such as Tik Tok, but the decline in user activity follows a year of notably bad PR for Facebook. Perhaps most significantly, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal documents and embarked on a world tour testifying with damaging allegations against the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (seen in October) suffered a rough year in 2021, culminating in a devastating decline in users in the final quarter following a number of controversies Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security during a hearing about Facebook File: Protecting Kids Online in October