Shares fall 9 percent on revenue miss

Facebook shares fell as much as 9 percent in afterhours trading Wednesday on lower-than-expected revenue numbers from its second-quarter earnings report.

Revenue totaled $13.23 billion — shy of the $13.33 billion analysts expected — raising worries that the political and social backlash against the company is affecting its bottom line. The company beat the profit forecast, with $1.74 per-share earnings.

“Despite facing important challenges, our community and business are off to a strong start in 2018,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO. “We are taking a broader view of our responsibility and investing to make sure our services are used for good. But we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together.”

Strong ad sales from Google, which is Facebook’s main competitor for online advertising, had sent expectations for the social network’s earnings up, along with its stock price.

The number of monthly users — a key indicator of Facebook’s popularity — rose slightly, to 2.23 billion from 2.2 billion last quarter.

But the number of people who use the network every day, representing Facebook’s most devoted users, remained flat in the U.S. at 185 million. That same number fell in Europe, where the company has had to comply with a strict new privacy law, known as GDPR.

Facebook growth was already slowing in Europe, and the new regulations may have added to that, said analyst Daniel Ives of GBH Tech Research. “GDPR is an added headwind, albeit containable,” he said.

The company in its initial news release did not break out financial or user numbers for Instagram, the photo-sharing service it acquired in 2012. Many Facebook analysts hope that Instagram’s growth will help offset any stagnation at the older social network. Instagram last month reported it had hit 1 billion monthly users for the first time, up from 800 million in September.

Facebook’s shares had gained more than 10 percent over the last month and closed higher at $217.50 on Wednesday, before the company reported earnings.