Facebook Lost Tens of Billions of Dollars in Minutes on Wall Street

The stock exchanges in New York started the trading session with losses on Thursday. Concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus weigh on sentiment.

Facebook lost tens of billions of dollars in market value in the first minutes, following a disappointing quarterly report from the social media company.

After a short half-hour trading, the Dow-Jones index was 0.2 percent lower at 28,679 points. The broad-based S&P 500 fell 0.3 percent to 3262 points, and the tech fair Nasdaq lost 0.2 percent to 9261 points.

Facebook was 6.2 percent lower, after a loss of almost 8 percent in the opening bell. That percentage is equivalent to around $ 50 billion in market value.

Quarterly figures showed that the costs of tackling fake news, for example, increased considerably. Sales in the fourth quarter also grew at the slowest pace in the company’s history.

Software giant Microsoft got the hands-on each other from investors. The group won 3 percent after the presentation of good results, in particular, thanks to success with cloud services. Electric car manufacturer Tesla won 10.6 percent after its second quarter in a row with profit and record sales for the company.

Cruise company Carnival fell 2.6 percent. A Carnival cruise ship with around 6,000 passengers is stuck in an Italian port because two Chinese passengers on board may have been infected with the coronavirus.