Facebook took a massive tumble on Thursday. This came after what shareholders perceived to be a mediocre performance on Wednesday's listings. Investors gave the tech site a big thumbs down. Facebook plummeted with a loss of about 19% (around $119 billion). According to the Wall Street Journal, it's "the largest single-day loss for a U.S.A listed company."
According to Slate.com, the fall-off started on Wednesday when the company notified that they hadn't met "analysts' expectations." Slate noted that the big Thursday fallout for "Facebook stock came after the company’s top executives told investors and analysts that revenue growth was expected to continue to decelerate for the rest of 2018."
Facebook dumped by investors in biggest single-day loss
The selling went crazy and by the end of Thursday, Facebook was at a 19% loss mark.
But AOL did point out that for a loss this big, the company had to have huge valuations in the first place. The knock-on effect saw things get a bit rocky for other companies like "Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet who all lost more than 1.5 percent at their overnight lows, and the Nasdaq 100 index dropped 1.4 percent in regular trading hours." But Business Insider's Jim Edwards mentioned that investors didn't listen when Zuckerberg warned of hard times ahead, earlier this year.
The piling up problems of Facebook
Confidence issues with Facebook began a while back, but the one that springs to mind is the misuse of user data that ended up with Cambridge Analytica all over the media. The Guardian reported that as many as 87 million users on Facebook had their data end up in the hands of the company.
The fallout from that saw Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg answering some tough questions in Congress. There's more than one federal investigation into the matter. Cambridge Analytica is not the only fire that Facebook is trying to put out. Long before the news of mishandled private data hit the headlines, there were questions about the Russians and the US Trump election.
The Silicon Valley company got a lot of criticism from all sides. People are upset the platform allows little conservative-focussed news. Other people are angry because they allow hate groups on the platform. Other users hate the fact that conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are still on Facebook. Everyone is annoyed with their seeming inability to get to grip with the massive proliferation of fake news.
Small publishers are irritated because their news isn't false but they get flagged as fake. Big news outlets with a history of fake news reporting get prominent placing. The whole world seems to be angry at Facebook for one thing or another.
Is this crash the beginning of the end for the tech company?
The Guardian ran an opinion piece that asked if this was the end of the company or just a "blip?" In the article, Olivia Solon noted that Loup Ventures’ Gene Munster said, " It’s usually a slow progression going from hyper-growth to just growth. In this case, it’s a step function down. That’s why you are seeing more of an overreaction." This came after chief financial officer for Facebook, David Wehner, said: “We expect our revenue growth rates to decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters sequentially in both Q3 and Q4.”
On top of all the bad things about fake news and privacy, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation cost Facebook about three million users.
However, the company could stabilize. The Guardian reminded readers that Facebook valuation is higher than it was "after the US Federal Trade Commission confirmed it was investigating the company over its privacy practices following the Cambridge Analytica revelations."
Even if Facebook has a harrowing time ahead, they have the comfortable safety mat of Instagram and other group platforms to cushion the fall.
