Following the company’s data breach scandal, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) saw the end of the week with a $58 billion drop in value.
After founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the data breach, which affected 50 million users, shares in the group fell from $176.80 on Monday to $159.30 on Friday.
Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, has said that the controversy has been a “damaging episode” for the tech giant.
“One of the secrets of Facebook’s success has been that the more people who use Facebook, the more integral it becomes to its customers. Unfortunately for Facebook, the same dynamic cuts in the opposite direction if it loses a meaningful number of users as a result of this scandal,” he added.
The backlash for the tech giant has been widespread, with Elon Musk deleting the Facebook pages for his companies Telsa (NASDAQ: TSLA) and Space X in the spread of the #deletefacebook movement.
Since the data breach came to light, Zuckerberg has taken out full-page adverts in UK and US Sunday newspapers to apologise.
In the US, the ads appeared in The New York Times (NYSE: NYT), The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal (OTCMKTS: WSCO).
In the UK, the apology appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Observer, Sunday Mirror and Sunday Express.
“This was a breach of trust, and I am sorry,” it read.
“I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others,” the social media giant’s chief added.
Shares in Facebook were initially priced at $38 each in 2012, which steadily climbed to $190 by February this year.
