Facebook is seeing a surge in usage

Today Facebook reported its first quarter earnings for 2020 and the company is seeing “a record number of people” using its services.

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Its no surprise that people are using apps that help them stay connected to family and friends remotely. Every service that address that use case is seeing a surge in usage. Facebook said that most of the usage is happening on its Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp chat apps.

Facebook said they were seeing surges of more than 50% on its messaging products. Facebook now reports it has 700 million daily calls across Messenger and WhatsApp.

“We don’t monetize many of the services where we’re seeing increased engagement, and we’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19. We’re just trying to keep the lights on over here,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times in an interview.

Facebook fully expects to see a decline in usage as the surge is likely temporary.

“Our business has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and, like all companies, we are facing a period of unprecedented uncertainty in our business outlook. We expect our business performance will be impacted by issues beyond our control, including the duration and efficacy of shelter-in-place orders, the effectiveness of economic stimuli around the world, and the fluctuations of currencies relative to the US dollar,” reads the company’s forward-looking statement.

“We expect that we will lose at least some of this increased engagement when various shelter-in-place restrictions are relaxed in the future.”

“We experienced a significant reduction in the demand for advertising, as well as a related decline in the pricing of our ads, over the last three weeks of the first quarter of 2020,” the company said.

Facebook reported revenue of $17.7 billion and profit of $4.9 billion. 18 percent and 102 percent jumps from this time last year, respectively.

The number of people who log into Facebook daily jumped 11 percent from Q1 2019 to 1.7 billion, while the number of monthly active users increased by 10 percent to 2.6 billion.