Meta Lost 20 Million Users Last Quarter, Blames Iran and Russia

Meta just reported losing 20 million daily active users in the last quarter. That’s a lot of people, even for a company that counts billions. The official line? Internet disruptions in Iran and a WhatsApp block in Russia.

Sure, those are real problems. Iran has been cutting off internet access during protests, and Russia has been throttling or blocking WhatsApp since the invasion of Ukraine. But 20 million is a big number to pin entirely on two countries, especially when one of them (Iran) has a population of about 88 million and the other (Russia) around 144 million. Even if every single person in those countries stopped using Meta’s apps, you’d still need a chunk of users elsewhere to disappear.

Meta’s “Family daily active people” metric lumps together Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. That’s convenient for painting a rosy picture, but it also makes it easy to hide churn in one app behind growth in another. If Instagram is flat but Facebook is bleeding, you’d never know from this number alone.

What’s interesting is that Meta isn’t slowing down its AI spending. The company plans to pump billions more into AI infrastructure this year, even as user numbers dip. That feels like a bet that AI features will eventually drive engagement and revenue, but it’s a gamble. AI is expensive, and users are fickle. If people are already leaving, throwing more compute at them might not bring them back.

I’ve been watching Meta’s user numbers for years, and this is the first time I’ve seen a decline this sharp outside of a major scandal or a platform redesign. The Iran and Russia excuses feel thin. Meta has a history of blaming external factors for internal problems. Remember when they blamed Apple’s privacy changes for a revenue shortfall? That was partly true, but it also masked the fact that their ad targeting was getting weaker.

Bottom line: losing 20 million users is a warning sign, not a blip. Meta can spin it however they want, but investors should be paying attention. AI spending won’t fix a product people don’t want to use.