Facebook faces loss

San Francisco, July 26: The giant Social media network, Facebook lost about $130 billion in market value in just two hours, its steepest stock decline ever, after warning of slowing sales growth.

The stock, which plunged as much as 24% in after-hours trading Wednesday, had a cascading effect on competitors Snap and Twitter, which dropped, too. Traders are bracing for a decline in tech stocks when the markets open Thursday.

Chief financial officer David Wehner triggered the selloff when he said sales growth would continue to slow through the rest of the year. Shares, which had already declined 7 percent after hours, then fell as much as 24 percent after the comments on a conference call with analysts.

The personal wealth of Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took a major hit. He lost $16.8 billion in extended trading. If that loss holds through Thursday's close, he will slip to sixth place from third in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

After-hours declines don't always hold the next day. But the sell-off points to growing concerns that Facebook will not emerge unscathed from the many controversies it faces.

The stock slide began right after Facebook reported second-quarter results after the market closed Wednesday. It was the first full financial report since Facebook became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March. Shares, which hit a record high Wednesday, plunged as much as 11% after Facebook posted the results.

The problem: weaker-than-expected revenue growth, Facebook's first such miss since 2015. It recorded sales of $13.23 billion for the three months ended in June, short of the $13.3 billion Wall Street anticipated.

Also alarming to investors: Facebook's growth is slowing with users in some of its most lucrative markets. Facebook reported its slowest growth rate ever, with 2.23 billion people logging in at least once a month in June, below the 2.25 billion analysts expected.

Growth in the number of users who logged in each day fell short, too, up 11 percent year-over-year at 1.47 billion but still less than the 1.49 billion anticipated. Daily usage was unchanged in Facebook's biggest market, the United States and Canada, at 185 million daily users. Facebook saw a decline in Europe to 279 million daily users.