When tech historians of the future look back at 2018, it may stand out as the year that the wheels came off Facebook or at least its original platform.
Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus all had their troubles but managed to escape the year without seeing their brands trashed in quite the same way as their parent.
So, it's no surprise to see articles related to Facebook's various scandals secured it three of the spots in BBC Tech's most-read stories list for 2018.
Two other controversy magnets – Elon Musk and Huawei – however, narrowly missed out.
And for the first time since we started compiling this list in 2012, none of the placings went to a product launch.
Below are the most clicked on articles for each month of the year – a mix of controversy, endeavour and sparkly revenge.
Software flaws have long been a bane of computing, but when news emerged of serious vulnerabilities in popular processor chips there was a serious intake of breath from the cyber-security community.
Billions of PCs, smartphones and other devices were said to be susceptible to the Meltdown and Spectre bugs – including, as it emerged, Apple's products.
At one point there was talk of owners having to brace themselves for their machines feeling noticeably more sluggish as a result of the workarounds that would be needed, or even needing to send their computers in for component swap-outs.
A year on, there doesn't appear to have been any malware related to the flaws reported in the wild, even though further variants of the originally disclosed exploits have been discovered.
And as far as personal computers are concerned, the patches released don't appear to have caused much of a hit to performance.
Deepfakes gave the internet something else to worry about in February, after it emerged that free software meant anyone could replace the face of one person with another's in video footage so long as you had enough photos of the latter.
Inevitably, the tool was used to create pornography with a range of predominantly young female celebrities' features generated to supplant those of the original adult actresses. One after another websites lined up to ban the content until Reddit, which had been home to much of it, decided to do likewise.
As the algorithms involved have improved, there has been much discussion about the danger of fake news creators adopting the face-mapping technique to create bogus videos of politicians.
But there's another worrying trend.
It appears that some Deepfakers are attempting to scrape social media for images of acquaintances that they can turn into pornography, and have been sharing details of their progress in chat forums.
Donald Trump's election in 2016 helped put Cambridge Analytica in the public eye after reports that its psychological profiles of US voters had helped his campaign target messages.
But the London-based consultancy only became a household name after a report in the Observer explained how the firm had made use of millions of harvested Facebook accounts' details, while a follow-up Channel 4 TV report recorded the consultancy's chief on tape discussing how beautiful girls could be sent to a politician's house as a honey-trap.
Facebook also found itself in the firing line. It didn't help itself by first trying to suppress the story and then quibbling over whether it warranted being described as a "data breach". (Read More: BBC)