Facebook ends 2018 with record profits

Facebook finished 2018 with record profits despite a string of privacy scandals and public relations crises that have brought the company under tough regulatory scrutiny.

The social network brought in $6.8 billion in profits in the last three months of 2018, a 61 percent increase over the fourth quarter of the previous year, Facebook announced on Wednesday.

And the company now says that its services — including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram — now count about 2.7 billion users, 2 billion of whom use at least one of the programs every day.

“Our community and business continue to grow,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “We’ve fundamentally changed how we run our company to focus on the biggest social issues, and we’re investing more to build new and inspiring ways for people to connect.