Facebook’s parent company Meta is currently undergoing one of the biggest stock price drops in the company’s history. Meta’s shares plummeted by more than 23% over the past 24 hours—which will ultimately result in Meta’s market cap crashing down by $210 billion, to about $689 billion.
This comes as a direct result of Mark Zuckerberg’s disappointing earnings report on Wednesday evening, which revealed that the company had fallen below its projected earnings estimates for the last quarter of 2021. As a consequence, the company is forecasting another low-earning quarter in 2022.
According to Zuckerberg’s lengthy post, Apple is largely to blame for the blow to the company’s revenue.
He directly called out Apple and its App Tracking Transparency policy in his report, claiming that the tech giant’s privacy-friendly update in iOS 14.5 is going to end up costing Meta $10 billion, as the company is currently rebuilding its entire ad infrastructure in order to better target iOS users going forward.
“Next up is ads,” Zuckerberg began. “With Apple’s iOS changes and new regulation in Europe, there’s a clear trend where less data is available to deliver personalized ads.”
“But people still want to see relevant ads,” he continued, “and businesses still want to reach the right customers. So we’re rebuilding a lot of our ads infrastructure so we can continue to grow and deliver high-quality personalized ads.”
As part of this restructuring process, Meta has announced that it will be an increasing focus on Instagram Reels—which have been becoming increasingly popular with users’ decreasing attention spans—as well as other investments that may prove profitable in the long run. A huge part of that is Meta’s grand plans to revolutionize the internet by introducing the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg also revealed that for the first time in history, Facebook has seen a visible decline of active users on the platform during the fourth quarter of 2021. Yet the company is holding on to the hope that things will take a turn for the better with the new ad infrastructure, as well as project Metaverse.