Meta: number of employees 2004-2025

As of December 2025, Meta Platforms employed 78,865 full-time workers, nearly 4,800 more than the previous year. 

Facebook: how it all began

In 2003, a sophomore at named Mark Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of the university's computer network in order to find photos of other students. He then would pair two of them next to each other on a program called “Facemash” and ask users to choose the more attractive person. At the beginning of 2004, Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook,” a social network dedicated to Harvard students, which later grew to encompass Columbia, Yale and Stanford. The popularity of this new service sky-rocketed and in mid-2004, Zuckerberg interrupted his studies and moved his operation to Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. By 2006, Facebook was open to the general public. In 2020,  the company reported almost 86 billion U.S. dollars in revenue and a net income of 29.15 billion US dollars. It is also the most popular social network in the world, with 2.7 billion monthly active users as of December 2020.

Facebook employee diversity criticism

Like many other tech companies, Facebook has been criticized for having a diversity problem. As of June 2020, tech positions, as well as management roles in U.S. offices were overwhelmingly occupied by men. Furthermore, almost 41 percent of Facebook employees in the U.S. are White and only 3.9 percent are African-American, which has sparked concern regarding representation and equal opportunities. Around 63.2 percent of senior level positions are occupied by White employees and only 4.3 percent by Hispanic-Americans.