After placing at $38, Facebook’s shares briefly peaked at $45 before sinking back to $38.25 on their first day of trading. They have fallen every day since then, and today plummeted nearly 10pc to a low of $28.84 at the close in New York. …

“Historically, initial public offerings that trade down this quickly don’t ever recover. Brokers have lost quite a bit of money and many will have their own rules about dropping out when it passes that [$30] barrier.”

The slump fuelled fears of a wider technology bubble, particularly among other social networks and consumer-orientated companies. In Russia, Vkontakte, which out-ranks Facebook as the country’s most popular social network, with 119m users, pulled its own IPO “indefinitely”.