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A perfect answer by someone, why FACEBOOK used PHP.

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If someone like Mark Zuckerberg were creating Facebook today (2012 as I am writing this answer), sure, no doubt they would consider many other languages, frameworks, platforms, architectures.
It's impossible to say whether they would still choose PHP today if they were starting out. Other social-network companies are starting today, and clearly, some fraction of them are still choosing PHP. They may choose PHP because it does the job they need to do, and they know they can hire developers who know it and can be productive with it.
Facebook has obviously been very successful using PHP (even though at that time PHP 5.0.0 was still beta).  There's a strong argument to be made that writing viable software has little to do with the choice of language.  One can find anecdotes of successful projects or disastrous projects using any language.
According to the history described on the Wikipedia page for Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook in October 2003. 
Consider what other web technologies might be considered, and whether they existed in 2003:
  • Ruby existed, but no Rails yet (1.0 was introduced in July 2004).
  • Java 1.4 with JSF 1.x or Spring 1.0.
  • Perl 5.8, but no Catalyst framework (it was introduced February 2005).
  • Python existed, but no Django framework (it was introduced in July 2005).
  • The term Ajax for web programming was coined in 2005, but the use of asynchronous XML requests was still nonstandard, too early to be used with for broad browser compatibility.
  • C# 1.0 and .NET 1.1 (C# 2.0 was introduced June 2006).
  • JavaScript existed, but no Node.js (it was developed in 2009) and no jQuery (it was introduced August 2006).
  • Amazon EC2 was released in August 2006.
  • Heroku was founded in 2007.
  • Go first appeared publicly in 2009.

The point is that Facebook's choice of PHP was perfectly reasonable for the time it was created.
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