Facebook popularized the phrase “move fast and break things.”
The slogan became associated with Facebook during its rapid expansion in the 2000s and early 2010s. It expressed a product-development culture that favored speed, frequent experimentation, and releasing changes rather than waiting for perfect certainty.
Mark Zuckerberg later replaced the slogan internally with “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” reflecting the challenges of operating a huge social network. The change acknowledged that the consequences of technical failures become much larger when billions of users rely on a service.
The phrase is often interpreted as a general rule that startups should ignore quality or safety. Its original cultural meaning was narrower: teams should avoid excessive bureaucracy and learn quickly from real-world use. In later discussions, critics used it to debate privacy, reliability, and the social effects of technology platforms.