Facebook (FB) Stock Down Only 1.65% While Mark Zuckerberg Encourages Social Distancing

UTC by Bhushan Akolkar · 4 min read
Facebook (FB) Stock Down Only 1.65% While Mark Zuckerberg Encourages Social Distancing
Photo: Depositphotos

Joining hands with several health services, Facebook will be releasing an information center to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. Facebook has also extended monetary help for small businesses affected due to the virus spread. Yesterday, FB stock was in red.

The rising number of cases of the COVID-19 has put the world on hiatus and there seems to be no immediate solution to it. This has got the market crashing further despite all the fiscal stimulus measures. The Dow Jones surged a 1000 points on Tuesday after the Trump government announced $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus earlier this week. However, the markets reacted positively to this new only for a single day. On Wednesday, Dow Jones crashed another 6% and 1300 points to go all the way below $20,000. Just in a month’s time, Dow Jones has corrected 33% percent marking one of the fastest market corrections in history. Besides, the volatility in the market has reached a new high.

As leaders across the globe evaluate the situation, Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg has come forward to help the global community. On Tuesday, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) said that it will be pumping $100 million to 30,000 small businesses across the globe affected due to the pandemic. Besides, the company also decides to give an additional $1000 bonus to all its full-time employees to combat this situation.

Setting Up Information Centers for Facebook Users

On Wednesday, the Facebook CEO said that the company will roll out a coronavirus information center. This will appear at the top of every users’ newsfeed and encourage them to practice social distancing. This information shall be available to the U.S. and European users in the next 24 hours. Similarly, it will available to Facebook’s global users in the following days. Zuckerberg said that this Coronavirus information is built in partnership with different health partners. He added:

“The goal here is to put authoritative information from organizations like the GDC and WHO in front of everyone who uses our services. The broad consensus is that the biggest role we can help play is encouraging people to take the social distancing orders seriously”.

Besides, the company is moving the extra mile to help the government and other emergency organizations. In this regard, Facebook will make its enterprise communications software – Workplace – available for free for the next 12 months. The Facebook CEO told:

“We want to make sure we’re doing what we can to help support the public health response. Some of the work that these folks are doing is absolute heroic, and I’m personally very grateful for what they’re doing.”

Besides, Zuckerberg said that Facebook has seen a massive increase in its WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger services during this pandemic period. He said that Facebook is working hard to make sure that their infrastructure is robust enough to support this rise in demand.

“We really need to make sure we’re on top of this from an infrastructure perspective to make sure things don’t melt down and we can continue to provide the level of service that people need,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook (FB) Stock Tanks 30% in Last Month

Just like global markets, the Facebook stock has collapsed over 30% due to this COVID-19 pandemic. The Facebook stock has slipped all the way from 220 levels to now below 150 levels. On Wednesday, despite Dow Jones crashing heavily, Facebook managed to contain its losses under 2%.

During the last trade closing, the Facebook stock was trading 1.65% down at $146.96 with a market cap of $418 billion. This has led many people to believe that Facebook stock is currently available at cheap price. But some analysts believe that it could be a bit early to enter at this stage. However, after hours, FB stock started gaining and managed to ass 2.92%.

Along with Facebook, several other companies have issued work from home advisory to its employees. We expect other companies to take similar measures in this regard.

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