The record fine was levied by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) after a three-year probe into the social media giant.
The DPC said that Meta had breached part of the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules in the way that it had moved data of Facebook users across borders.
It ordered Meta Ireland to “suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US within the period of five months” and also levied a record fine on the business “to sanction the infringement that was found to have occurred”.
Meta called the fine “unjustified”.
The multi-year process which led to the fine was kicked off by Edward Snowden in 2013 when the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower revealed that US authorities were surveilling systems run by several US companies.
Companies had long been allowed to transfer EU customers’ data to the US to help them run their business, but only on a promise that they were protecting this data as well as if it...