Facebook finally surpassed the magic figure of 1 billion users in September. This is a major milestone for Facebook which was launched 8 years ago. On the other hand, the latest figures also underline the upcoming challenges for the company.

Facebook has been facing a tough time in the stock market since the May 18 public offering. The company sources have stated that there is need for a slowdown in new-user acquisition with the increasing expansion of their service across the world.

There were increasing criticisms and doubts on how Facebook will manage to gain revenue from the growing number of users. Several well known analysts had publicly criticized Facebook for its failure in monetizing the increasing number of users accessing Facebook from mobile devices. All those criticisms seem to stand invalid for the time being with the latest figures convincing Wall Street of the growth of Facebook.

Reports suggest almost 102 million new users to have joined Facebook during the first three months of 2012. From April to June, the number of new users stood at 54 million which took the total figures to 955 million. From July till September 14, 45 million new users joined the platform making Facebook surpass the 1 billion mark.

When asked by a news channel about how with a billion users, the company was not ‘killing it’ by making money, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook was stated saying, “It depends on your definition of ‘killing it’. I mean, we are making billions of dollars.”

Facebook had a challenging journey so far. It took three years for the platform to add the first 50 million users. But then a rise in popularity of the service was observed which took the numbers to 500 million in 2010. Facebook stated that it currently has 600 million mobile users as of now compared to 543 million it had in the month of June this year.

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