Facebook's parent company Meta has suffered the largest corporate share price plummet in Wall Street history.
Quarterly figures for the social media site were released this week and have revealed it has lost followers for the first time in its history.
That has sent investors scared as Meta also tries to embark on a new frontier of virtual reality and the metaverse.
After markets opened for trading on Thursday (January 3), Meta's share price fell 24.5 per cent, which wiped a whopping US$226 billion from its market value, according to the ABC.
That is the single biggest fall in history and just shy of a quarter of a trillion dollars.
If this fall holds then CEO Mark Zuckerberg could see his net worth fall from US$120.6 billion to around US$97 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The the Sydney Morning Herald says that would mean he would plummet from that Index and would fall outside the top 10 wealthiest people in the world for the first time since mid-2015.
Laura Hoy, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be keen to coax the world into an alternate reality, but disappointing fourth-quarter results were quick to burst his metaverse bubble."
Meta's fall wasn't the only to suffer when the markets opened late this week.
The S&P 500 index dropped 1.4 per cent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 2.3 per cent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 275 points to 35,353.
The previous owner of the record for the largest Wall Street drop in history was also Facebook.
Back in mid-2018, the company saw a whopping US$119 billion shredded from its value in one day after figures revealed growth was starting to slow down.
That triggered concerns that the public's interest in joining Facebook after all these years was starting to wane.
Facebook believes this latest fall in users was caused by a rise in interest in competitor apps like TikTok and YouTube, according to the BBC.
But Zuckerberg is confident that they will be able to hold off the competition in the coming years as they diversify their offerings.
"The teams are executing quite well and the product is growing very quickly," he said.
"The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate."
Stewart Perrie