Just like an infectious disease, social networks can spread rapidly, gaining millions of users in a short amount of time, and then abruptly die off. It happened to MySpace, and Facebook could be next, according to a new study from Princeton University.

Researchers at the university's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering predict that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 percent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017. The researchers leveraged epidemiological models used to track the spread of infectious diseases and publicly available Google search data to analyze the adoption and abandonment of online social networks.

"The application of disease-like dynamics to OSN [online social network] adoption follows intuitively, since users typically join OSNs because their friends have already joined," the researchers wrote in their report. "Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models."

According to the study, Facebook has already "reached the peak of its popularity" and has now entered a period of decline, as evidenced by a downward trend in search frequency after 2012. As users now begin to abandon the social network, "recovery" will spread infectiously, meaning others will begin to jump ship after their peers have left.

Take MySpace, for instance. The once-mega-popular social network, founded in 2003, peaked in 2008 with 75.9 million unique monthly visits in the U.S. before "decaying to obscurity" by 2011, the study notes. The site was purchased by News Corp. during its rapid growth phase in 2005 for $580 million, and sold six years later at a loss for $35 million.

"The dynamics governing the rapid rises and falls of OSNs are therefore not only of academic interest, but also of financial interest to incumbent and emerging OSN providers and their stakeholders," the researchers wrote.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment about the study when contacted by PCMag on Wednesday.

Facebook had a year of milestones in 2012, from its much-hyped initial public offering to reaching 1 billion active users, and its acquisition of Instagram. More recently, there has been cause for concern. This past December, preliminary results from a multi-country, European Union-funded study found that older teens in the United Kingdom "are turning away in their droves" from Facebook "and adopting other social networks instead," though COO Sheryl Sandberg isn't too concerned.

Facebook currently boasts 1.19 billion monthly active users, as of its last earnings report released in Sept. 30. Princeton's study suggests that the social network could lose more than 800 million users over the next three years, or more than 200 million per year.