On Monday, Facebook shares declined by around 5% after the firm experienced its worst service outage in about 13 years. The outage came a day after “60 Minutes” aired an interview with a whistleblower, who blamed Facebook for betraying democracy.
Remarkably, the market was broadly down Monday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sinking by more than 2%. The slump was particularly sharp among social media stocks, as Twitter, Snap, and Pinterest each plunged by over 5%.
Facebook’s main app suffered an outage in the previous session, as did its Instagram and WhatsApp services. Remarkably, they were offline as of market close.
The company apologized to users on Twitter account for any inconvenience, saying that they were working to get things back to normal as soon as possible.
Facebook witnessed its worst outage since 2008, when a bug knocked the firm’s services offline for about a day, affecting nearly 80 million users. Notably, Facebook now has 3 billion users.
It’s been a hard week for Facebook and got worse Sunday night.
As we know, Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the whistleblower who provided key internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal.
Frances Haugen was a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation division. He left the firm in May. Haugen made copies of various internal files before departing the company. Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing its own profits over public safety — putting individuals’ lives at risk.
Facebook shares slipped 4.9% to settle at $326.23. However, the stock is still up 19% this year.
Facebook shares increased 1.5% in premarket trading following a 5% decline
As of Tuesday, Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up 125 points. Meanwhile, S&P 500 futures advanced 0.4% while Nasdaq 100 futures boosted 0.5%
Facebook shares surged 1.5% in premarket trading following a 5% decline on Monday amid a whistleblower’s claims and a site outage. Other tech giants, Amazon and Apple, were higher in the premarket after each falling by more than 2% on Monday. Additionally, Microsoft and Netflix were also higher.
In the previous session, the Nasdaq Composite sank 2.1% for its sixth negative day in seven as the tech heavyweights declined. The blue-chip Dow dropped more than 300 points, while the S&P 500 fell 1.3%, weighed on by technology shares.
Tech sector was among the worst-performing sectors of September as a rise in yields caused investors to rotate out of the highly valued shares since increasing rates can make their future profits look less appealing. Yields are rising as the Fed signaled in September it would begin tapering its monthly bond-buying soon.
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