Facebook reaches 1 billion users milestone

Facebook announced on Thursday that it had reached the 1 billion active monthly users benchmark last month, in addition to adding 45 million users since June.

Shares of Facebook still remain well below the $38 debut price, as the company has not fared well since its initial public offering in May, Reuters noted.

Facebook apparently hit the milestone of 1 billion active monthly users on September 14 at 12:45 p.m. Pacific time.

In a status update on Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote:

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you're reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

In an interview on Thursday, Zuckerberg said that "we're in a tough cycle now and that doesn't help morale, but people are focused on what they're building," according to the Associated Press.

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He told the Today show's Matt Lauer that Facebook's future lay in mobile, and that he was the right person to lead the company, despite misgivings on Wall Street.

Zuckerberg told Bloomberg, "The big thing we’ve focused on is getting everyone connected and assembling this map of who people know. That way we can start to build interesting products like News Feed, or show who’s online for chat, or rank your friends so they’re in the right order for a search."

"We get the honor of building things that a billion people use. I mean, there’s no core need. It isn’t a core human need to use Facebook. It’s a core human need to stay connected with the people you care about. The need to open up and connect is such a deep part of what makes us human," he said.

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