Meta Platforms shareholders and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg reached a settlement on Thursday, halting an $8 billion trial in Delaware less than two days after it began. The undisclosed agreement ends proceedings that sought to hold current and former company directors personally liable for repeated privacy lapses at Facebook. Filed in 2018, the derivative action alleged that Zuckerberg, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and other board members allowed Facebook to operate as an illegal data-harvesting enterprise in violation of a 2012 consent order with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Investors argued the defendants should reimburse Meta for more than $8 billion in regulatory penalties and legal costs, including the record $5 billion fine the FTC imposed on the company in 2019. The non-jury trial opened on 16 July before Chief Judge Kathaleen McCormick in Delaware’s Court of Chancery and was scheduled to run through 25 July. Zuckerberg was expected to take the stand next week, with testimony also anticipated from Sandberg and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, among others. Settlement terms were not made public, and neither side commented in court. Judge McCormick adjourned the case after lawyers informed her of the deal, praising the parties for resolving the dispute. Meta itself was not a defendant in the action. The litigation stemmed from revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent, a scandal that intensified global scrutiny of the social-media giant’s treatment of personal information and continues to influence regulatory oversight of Big Tech.