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Lesser known trivia about Facebook

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Hello & welcome to another edition of the GK Nugget. 

Did you know that from Jan to March 2017, Indians spent 2.5 hours a day on apps, higher than the 2 hours they spent during the same period in 2016? And this is more than the 1.5-2 hours spent by citizens of the US, UK, Germany and France.

And did you know that WhatsApp has 1.2 billion active users currently, making it the most popular mobile app globally.

But today’s GK Nugget will bring you some lesser known facts about another app/website that we spend a lot of our time on – WhatsApp’s mother company – Facebook.
(Facebook bought over WhatsApp for $19 billion in Feb 2014)


On 18th May 2012, Facebook was listed on NASDAQ (US stock exchange, which is the 2nd largest in the world). It was the largest tech IPO till then, making the company worth $104 billion. (Alibaba listed on the New York Stock Exchange -largest stock exchange in the world- in Sept 2014 at a company worth of $230 billion).
In the 5 years since its IPO, Facebook’s worth has almost quadrupled to $420 billion.

Facebook has about 2 billion users, out of which 1.28 billion are daily users. That’s like all of India using Facebook daily.

Facebook designated Feb. 4, 2016 as "Friends Day" in celebration of the social networking site's 12th birthday.

Up until 2007, the Facebook website had a pixelated face on the top right, as part of the homepage design. That face belonged to none other than Oscar-winning actor Al Pacino, from his younger days.



Ever wondered why Facebook is blue in colour? (Hint: It’s not because Blue is most people’s favourite colour). It’s because Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has red-green colour blindness and blue is the colour that he can see completely.

The “Like” button that we all are always trigger-happy with was going to be called the “Awesome” button.

Facebook’s user base grows by eight people per second or 7,246 people every 15 minutes.

For every minute that Facebook is down (inaccessible owing to technical issues at their end) the company loses $24,420.

Facebook’s net income in 2016 was approximately $10 billion. Compare that to the worth of the entire Tata Steel Company, which is worth about $7.29 billion.

Facebook stores approximately 300 PETABYTES of user data on its servers. There are 1 million gigabytes in a petabyte. Compare that with the fact that the entire written works of humankind, in every known language from the dawn of recorded history, would occupy approximately 50 petabytes.

6,00,000 hacking attempts are made to Facebook accounts every day.

And finally, if all the time spent on Facebook in the last 5 years, was spent doing even minimum wage work, the global economy would have been richer by $6 Trillion.


On that note, quickly share this nugget on Facebook and get to work :)
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