Facebook is down, but is it out?

February 3 is not a date Mark Zuckerberg will want to remember. This was the day his company’s stock, which was at $323 at the close of trading the day before, closed at $237, wiping $232 billion off Facebook’s market value, the largest one-day drop in NASDAQ history.

Facebook has experienced a few high-magnitude stock market plunges before, usually coinciding with the many scandals that have affected the company, but until now its share prices has recovered as soon as the scandal blew over and advertisers continued to pump money into their campaigns.

Is the current downturn any different? The signs are that it is. For one thing, two weeks after February 3, Facebook’s share price has continued to fall, and now sits $206, which means the company, which came close to entering the select trillion-dollar club, is now worth about $565 billion and it has lost its membership of the top-10 most valuable companies in the world.

What makes this latest crash different is that advertisers, whose lack of ethics kept Facebook and its properties afloat, no longer seem so interested. This is because huge numbers of users in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe are now using Apple’s privacy option, which means customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed due to lower-quality targeting, so advertisers are taking their business to other…