Facebook has reported its financial results for the third quarter and despite the numerous problems plaguing the service in 2018, things are going well.

The social network has had a tough year what with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the recent disclosure that 29 million users may have had their private data compromised.

Despite all of these issues Facebook is still growing its user base. Daily active users climbed nine percent year-on-year to 1.49 billion on average and monthly active users have climbed 10 percent to 2.27 billion.

Sure the growth is not extreme but estimates suggest that 2.6 billion are now using Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger every month. Just over 2 billion people use one of the aforementioned Facebook services every day.

“We had a solid quarter, and our community and business continue to grow quickly. 2.3 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.5 billion every day,” Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg said in an update.

All those eyes are primed for advertising and Facebook has reported strong growth in that regard.

Revenue from advertising increased 33 percent year-on-year to $13.72 billion. The largest portion of that revenue – 92 percent – came from mobile advertising up from 88 percent in the third quarter of 2017.

The social network is now working to bolster its services. Two main areas of focus will be messaging and stories.

For messaging, Facebook wants to make WhatsApp and Messenger faster, simpler and add functionality such as the ability to make payments through the apps.

For stories the firm notes that over a billion stories are shared everyday. That having been said users aren’t willing to swap their timelines for stories just yet and that present a problem.

Facebook wants to make money from advertising in stories but its early days still and it’s not making money just yet.

“We’re following our normal playbook here of building out the best consumer products first and focusing on succeeding there before ramping up ads. I’m optimistic that we’ll get ads in stories to perform as well as feed over time, and that the opportunity will be even bigger because it looks like stories will be a bigger medium than feed has been,” explained Zuckerberg.

So despite warnings that the third quarter might not be successful, Facebook appears to be holding strong. Whether the final quarter will be as stable given the recent disclosure of a breach remains to be seen.