MORE THAN a billion people are logging in to Facebook on a monthly basis, the social networking site confirmed yesterday.

Facebook’s statistics show the milestone was reached at 12.45pm (Pacific time) on September 14th. The majority of these users – 81 per cent – are located outside the US and Canada, Facebook said.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg thanked users in a Facebook post.

“If you are reading this, thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you,” he wrote. “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”

Some 552 million are logging in to the site on a daily basis, according to the site’s last count in June.

The site, which was founded by Mr Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, hit 500 million users in July 2010. More than 600 million users log in through mobile devices every month.

Since its launch the site has seen more than 140 billion friend connections, 265 billion photos uploaded and 17 billion located tagged posts.

But that hasn’t come without difficulty. The social networking site has fallen foul of privacy campaigners, and has been subject to audits by data protection watchdogs.

Facebook was last month given four weeks by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner to fully comply with its recommendations on improving user privacy, or face enforcement action.

The audit found that although the firm, which has an office in Ireland, had implemented many of the recommendations and had even, in some cases, gone beyond what authorities had asked for, there was still work to do on a “small number” of issues.

The company faces fines of up to €100,000 if it fails to meet the deadline.

Facebook has also been forced to deny reports in recent days that private messages from up to five years ago were visible on its users’ pages. A spokesman for Facebook said reports had been investigated and found the messages in question were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users’ profile pages.