Facebook’s dream of connecting the whole world is dead

For 18 years, ever since Mark Zuckerberg started it in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has been growing. Through scandals, backlashes, regulatory pressure and competitive threats, it has kept growing — until now.

Meta, the new name for the company formerly called Facebook, reported Wednesday that Facebook lost daily users last quarter for the first time ever. While the company as a whole, which includes Instagram and WhatsApp, continued to grow, its flagship social network — the big blue app, as it’s known internally — stalled just shy of 2 billion...