Clumsy Google a laughing stock
A surprise corporate misstep and under target quarterly results wiped US$20 billion off the US technology giant's market value in minutes
It was a humiliating corporate gaffe the likes of which few can recall, particularly from a giant tech company like Google.
Within minutes, the surprise miss and the even more surprising mistake wiped out about US$20 billion in market value before Google asked Nasdaq to halt trading of its shares. Google quickly blamed the blunder on its financial printer, R.R. Donnelley & Sons.
The double whammy undercut three months of sharp gains that had put Google ahead of Microsoft to become the second most valuable technology company after Apple and hammered other technology stocks, including Facebook.
On the web, the incident quickly became a springboard for snarky commentary. Google, the Californian company that prides itself on organising the world's information, had blown it when organising its own.
And Google's very serious chief executive, Larry Page, found himself the brunt of jokes on Twitter. One account was called PendingLarry in honour of the prematurely filed news release, which had "pending" in the space where a quote from Page was supposed to be.