Facebook may have hit saturation point in counties like Britain and United States, where the social-networking giant has started suffering fall in usage.

According to Inside Facebook, as many as 6 million Americans shut down their Facebook accounts in May. In the beginning of May, there were 155.2 million Facebook accounts in the US, but at the end of the month the figure slipped to 149.4 million.

In Britain, more than 100,000 Facebook users abandoned their accounts during May. Russia and Norway have also registered fall in usage.

It appears that privacy threats might have forced Facebook users to shut down their accounts.

The social platform kept on growing globally, but the rate of growth slipped for the second consecutive month. Facebook gained 13.9 million and 11.8 million users in April and May respectively. The figures are not impressive when compared to a typical month over the last year, in which it added over 20 million new users.

Meanwhile, Facebook usage is increasing in heavily-populated developing countries.

Eric Eldon from Inside Facebook said, “So far, Facebook has been able to make up stalls and losses with big gains in heavily-populated developing countries like Mexico, Brazil, India and Indonesia.”

At the end of May, Facebook had a total of 687 million users worldwide.