Update- 7/26/2018 4:09 p.m. EDT- Facebook ended Thursday shedding 18.9 percent. CNBC reports its shares fell as low as $173.75 before ending at $176.26.

Original Story:

There were reasons to be optimistic about Facebook just a few hours before its quarterly earnings report came out on Wednesday afternoon. However, the company’s disappointing financials have the social media giant on track to call Thursday its worst day on the markets ever, according to CNBC.

Heading into Thursday, the biggest fall Facebook had ever suffered in one day was 11 percent. That was in July 2012, per CNBC. At the time of writing, FB shares are down more than 19 percent, according to Yahoo Finance. In other words, that is around $120 billion worth of lost market value for Mark Zuckerberg’s massive social network.

Not long before Facebook released its financials on Wednesday, there was at least some hope that the tech firm would please investors. The idea was that Facebook would soldier on and grow as expected despite several high-profile scandals in 2018 while boosting its overall business with its popular Instagram subsidiary.

Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP/Getty Images

Instead, Facebook reported slower-than-expected user and revenue growth. Revenue, in particular, grew at its slowest pace in years. The number of daily active users in North America stayed about the same, while the same metric in Europe actually fell by three million. That can be attributed to new privacy regulations that social networks are still trying to navigate, per CNBC.

It is possible that the general public is disillusioned with Facebook, given that the site has battled controversy after controversy throughout most of 2018. The Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal began in March and has persisted since then. As many as 87 million users had their personal data used by a right-wing election firm assisting President Donald Trump’s election campaign without their knowledge.

The scandal led to Zuckerberg directly addressing multiple world governmental bodies and at least one fine from a major country.

Since then, there has been a spotlight on Facebook’s use (or misuse) of user information. The site was recently forced to answer for the revelation that dozens of hardware companies had access to treasure troves of user data. Some of those companies were Chinese firms that lawmakers view as possible national security threats.