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Facebook Inc. services experienced widespread outages Monday morning, adding to the social network’s miserable day.
Facebook
FB,
shares dropped as much as 6% to an intraday low of $323, which would be their worst single day decline since a 6.3% fall logged on Oct. 30, 2020. The stock outpaced a 1.5% loss on the S&P 500 index
SPX,
and a 2.3% loss on the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
The decline followed a national broadcast of a whistleblower’s allegations that the social media network placed profits before safety. Late Sunday, ViacomCBS Inc.’s
VIAC,
news program “60 Minutes” interviewed former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen, who alleges that the social-media giant has been deceiving investors about how it has been dealing with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.
For more: Facebook whistleblower says her goal is not to damage the company
Haugen provided thousands of pages of documents to The Wall Street Journal, which formed the basis of the publication’s The Facebook Files series. Haugen is scheduled to testify before Congress on Tuesday morning and is also seeking whistleblower protection in complaints filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Adding to all of that was a widespread outage of Facebook services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, that started just before noon Eastern time. Even the status dashboard Facebook uses to communicate its availability to developers was not working Monday.
A Facebook spokesman took to Twitter Inc.’s
TWTR,
platform to confirm the issues.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” spokesman Andy Stone said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
While Facebook did not go into further detail on the cause of the outage, experts said on Twitter that it appeared to be a problem with the company’s domain-name system.
Through a series of public humiliations and recriminations, Facebook stock has largely avoided any fallout. Shares have gained 18.4% so far in 2021, outpacing the 16% growth of the S&P 500 index
SPX,
in that time, and have more than doubled over the past three years, gaining 106.2% in that time as the S&P 500 grew 51%.
From Barron’s: Why Facebook Stock Is Still a Buy Despite Controversies
Institutional analysts continue to recommend the stock as well. According to FactSet, 38 of the 51 analysts covering Facebook — 75% — rate it as a “buy” or equivalent, while 12 rate it “hold” and only one calls the stock a “sell.” The average price target as of Monday morning was $421.55, nearly 30% higher than the going rate.
