Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB) plunged more than 20 percent on Wednesday amid slowing revenue growth.
Monthly active users rose 11 percent year over year to 2.23 billion, alongside daily active users, at 1.47 billion.
Growth remained in the US and Europe, which constitute the company’s largest advertising markets.
However, this proved the social media’s slowest growth in more than two years.
Facebook are still dealing with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from the social media site was harvested by to create targeted voter advertising for the Vote Leave and US Election campaigns.
In response to the incident, the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation, which ultimately had a knock-on effect on user growth and engagement.
Specifically, European daily active users fell 3 million in the quarter, alongside a drop in month active users.
This proved the company’s first full quarter reporting since the privacy scandal was exposed back in March.
The results proved behind analyst expectations, resulting in shares plunging 24 percent during after-hours trading, shedding $130 million in value.
Wall Street analysts had been expecting user growth of around 1.49 billion, with revenues of $13.3 billion.
This proves the first time in Facebook’s history that it has missed analyst expectations.
The chief financial officer, David Wehner, said: “Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018, and we expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4.”
Explaining the disappointing growth, Wehner attributed weaker results to currency changes, privacy laws and different advertising strategies.
He added:
“We expect currency to be a slight headwind in the second half versus the tailwinds we have experienced over the last several quarters. We plan to grow and promote certain engaging experiences like Stories that currently have lower levels of monetisation, and we are also giving people who use our services more choices around data privacy, which may have an impact on our revenue growth”.
Shares in Facebook trading +1.32 percent as of 10.29 (GMT).
