San Francisco, August 28

Facebook boasted of a new benchmark on Thursday in its seemingly inexorable march to internet ubiquity: a billion people used the social network in a single day.

“We just passed an important milestone,” Chief Executive and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg declared in a post on his Facebook page.

“On Monday, one in seven people on earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family.”

“When we talk about our financials, we use average numbers, but this is different,” Zuckerberg added. “This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it’s just the beginning of connecting the whole world.”

Zuckerberg also posted a video dedicated to the achievement.

In its earnings update last month, Facebook said monthly active users surged 13 per cent from a year ago to 1.49 billion. The number of mobile active users rose to 1.31 billion.

Facebook on Thursday also said it is building new technology that video creators can use to guard against their works being copied at the social network without permission.