On Monday (24 August), one billion Facebook users, or “1 in 7 people on earth”, logged into the social media website, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post.

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

Reaching more such milestones requires greater penetration by Facebook of countries in the developing world. Partly this will be the responsibility of internet.org, which gives free access to around two dozen websites (Facebook being one of them) to people without internet, in countries like Kenya, South Africa, India and Bangladesh.

Last month, on internet.org’s first anniversary, Facebook said it had worked closely with “more than a dozen” operators across 17 countries on internet.org and it is available to more than a billion people.

If it wants to keep growing the one billion statistic, it will need to continue to expand the programme.

In the meantime, the scale of the social network’s achievement was reflected in a tweet by analyst Dean Bubley: “Facebook’s milestone of 1bn users on Monday is even more impressive if you remember 1.4bn in China can’t get it & another 1bn <15yo [15 years old]”.

The company launched Facebook Lite in June, a version of its app for Android users that consumes less data and hence will be suitable for networks in emerging markets.

In its Q2 results, Facebook said its monthly active users hit 1.49 billion as of end June 2015, an annual increase of 13 per cent, while mobile monthly active users were 1.3 billion.