Only months after a data privacy scandal, Facebook is seeing fewer frequent users than it expected.
In announcing its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, the social media company reported 2.23 billion monthly active users, shy of Wall Street forecasts of 2.25 billion. Its total user count represents an 11 percent increase over the year-ago period.
While it was the company’s first full quarter following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, analysts attributed the user growth shortfall largely to European privacy rules that went into effect in May.
It’s the first time Facebook missed an earnings report since 2015. It’s been a volatile day for the company’s stock, which reached a record high Wednesday morning before the earnings report came out.
Facebook shares fell more than 8 percent, to $199.95, in after-hours trading.
The Menlo Park, California-based company earned $5.1 billion, or $1.74 per share. The social media company posted revenue of $13.2 billion in the period, also short of Wall Street estimates. Fourteen analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research expected $13.4 billion.
Advertising revenue for the quarter was $13.04 billion, missing analyst forecasts of $13.16 billion.
“Our community and business continue to grow quickly,” Facbook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We are committed to investing to keep people safe and secure, and to keep building meaningful new ways to help people connect.”
Analysts are watching to see how Facebook recovers from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a data firm that improperly accessed information from as many as 87 million Facebook users.
Despite the focus on Facebook’s role in the affair, its shares have increased 23 percent since the beginning of the year, compared with a 6.5 percent rise for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. In the final minutes of U.S. trading on Wednesday, shares hit $217.50, an increase of 32 percent in the last 12 months, before slipping after the bell.
Daniel Ives, head of technology research at GBH Insights, said in a note that investors “clearly viewed Cambridge as a ‘blip on the radar,’ although some soft spots in the advertising and overall user metrics will fuel the debate about further bumps in the road” for Facebook.
“[T]he fundamental damage to the Facebook platform has been ‘very contained’ in our opinion and is generally better than feared from the white-knuckle period a few months ago,” he added.
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