Did Big Tech get a little smaller? The Washington Post reports on a “startling” loss of active subscribers at Meta/Facebook — enough of a loss for investors and advertisers to take a big notice. Whatever the reason, Facebook’s active-subscriber numbers are falling by mid-six figures a day globally.

Has the social-media giant become passé?

Facebook parent Meta’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday revealed a startling statistic: For the first time ever, the company’s growth is stagnating around the world.

Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021, to 1.93 billion logging in each day. The loss was greatest in Africa and Latin America, suggesting that the company’s product is saturated globally — and that its long quest to add as many users as possible has peaked.

Meta’s stock price plummeted more than 20 percent in after-hours trading following the news, dropping to about $249 per share and threatening to wipe about $200 billion off its market value. The company is facing challenges on multiple fronts, as competitor TikTok booms, federal and international regulators scrutinize its business practices, and it begins a lofty transition to focus on the “metaverse.”

Bloomberg explicitly calls this a “stock rout,” and credits TikTok as the drain away from the dominant social-media platform of the past two decades:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s stock collapsed as much as 26% on Thursday morning, its biggest drop ever, after Facebook’s user base faltered last quarter, the first stagnation in the company’s history. It was just one bad metric of several in a dire earnings report that caused many investors to wonder if the stock’s best days are behind it.

This quarter’s sales forecast also disappointed Wall Street and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who saw his personal wealth potentially plummet about $24 billion, acknowledged that Meta is facing serious competition for user time and attention, particularly from viral video-sharing app TikTok.

The dour outlook and stalled user momentum mark a dramatic turnaround for a company that has posted share gains in every year but one since its 2012 IPO, stoking concern that Meta Platforms flagship product and core advertising moneymaker has plateaued after years of consistent gains.

Don’t pass the hat for Zuckerberg quite yet. Assuming his personal wealth is entirely connected to his stake in Meta/Facebook, then he’s still got $70 billion or so left as a rainy-day fund. For that matter, “plateauing” might not be the best news Zuckerberg ever got, but it’s hardly a disaster either. Investors might have expected more growth than was possible, and now with the new activity measures showing a significant but still relatively small rollback by users, stock pricing will adjust to reflect a more updated valuation. Unless Meta/Facebook made some very bad decisions on investments, that won’t mean a collapse.

On that point, though …

Its newest ambition is off to a slow start, at least by one key metric. Facebook showed for the first time on Wednesday how much of a money-losing proposition its investment in virtual- and augmented-reality hardware is — the suite of products the company dubs the metaverse.

Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s hardware division that builds the Oculus Quest headset, lost $3.3 billion in the quarter, despite bringing in $877 million in revenue.

Even that should be taken with a grain of salt. Facebook brought in over $33 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2021, which makes this just an incremental setback. The transition into hardware such as the Oculus system has only just begun, so the biggest development costs would be up front. Unless Facebook begins seeing revenue fall by at least double digits, neither Zuckerberg nor his investors have much reason for panic.

In fact, these results might justify Zuckerberg’s strategic decision to focus on his “Meta” projects. The traditional Facebook platform appears to have saturated all markets, and upstarts will only keep eroding that position. An occasional facelift might momentarily jolt user activity upward, but online tech is always about the newer and faddish rather than the older and reliable. In that sense, Facebook has been amazingly tenacious in a marketplace known more for chasing shiny objects than in standing pat. What better way to prepare for the inevitability of becoming passé than using market leverage to define the Next Big Shiny Object?

Of course, to succeed in that course, Zuckerberg had better hope that he’s either right about Meta or so powerful that he can force the market to adopt it. The former would be in the tradition of classic innovation, but the latter is almost guaranteed to further stoke interest in anti-trust efforts against Meta/Facebook. And unlike Meta/FB’s active-subscriber activity, interest in anti-trust actions aimed at the Zuckerberg empire have not plateaued at all.