On September 6, 2012, Facebook officially closed its acquisition of Instagram, turning a deal first struck in a late-night handshake five months earlier into reality. The purchase was announced back in April 2012 at roughly $1 billion, split between cash and Facebook stock, but by the time the paperwork was finalized the value had slipped to somewhere around $736 million — Facebook’s own stock had taken a beating since its bumpy IPO that May, and a big chunk of the deal was paid in shares.
At the time, Instagram was a two-year-old startup with a headcount you could count on two hands and zero revenue, which made a billion-dollar price tag look reckless to a lot of observers. It didn’t look that way for long. Instagram went on to become one of the most valuable acquisitions in tech history, now anchoring a massive share of Meta’s advertising business and counting well over a billion users worldwide. Closing the deal also meant clearing regulatory review from the FTC and California’s Department of Corporations, both of which signed off in the weeks beforehand.
Also notable: Instagram marked the closing by announcing it had just crossed 5 billion photos shared on the platform — a number the app now blows past in a single day.
Source: TechCrunch
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