Mark Zuckerberg's Bad Week Gets Worse With Live - Streamed New Zealand Shooting

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has had a very bad week, even in the context of a very bad year.

The week of bad news actually started March 8 with a proposal from U.S. senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren to break up the company. Then there was the longest-ever outage of Facebook’s social network and services, which almost overshadowed news of a criminal investigation into its data-agreements with other companies. Facebook’s technical glitch was resolved just in time for it to post the departure of two key executives, including the one closely linked with the company’s most iconic product. But the ultimate blow came on Friday with the massacre of 50 people in New Zealand, live streamed on Facebook.

“Hedge funds who were previously complacent about the recent negative headlines are raising eyebrows on the news overnight,” Lynx Equity Strategies analyst Jahanara Nissar wrote in a note. The departure of two top executives also was “concerning — especially given that the conflict was over strategy.”

The snowball of bad news is catching up with the company. The shares had their worst day in more than two months Friday, falling 2.5 percent to close at $165.98.

Negative sentiment toward Facebook, as measured in tweets on Twitter, rose to the highest in almost eight months on Thursday. While sentiment can rise and fall with the thousands of daily tweets about the company, Facebook hadn’t seen that many negative comments since July, the day after disappointing revenue and user growth figures prompted the stock’s biggest-ever selloff.