NEW YORK (AP) -- Shares of social media companies tumbled Friday after Facebook made a lackluster stock-market debut amid reports of a slew technical trading glitches.
After pricing at $38, Facebook Inc. shares opened at $42.05 on the Nasdaq market. The shares quickly fell back to their IPO price but later rebounded, rising $3.33, or 8.8 percent, to $41.33 in early afternoon trading.
Nasdaq initially planned the first trades of Facebook's stock for 11 a.m. EDT, then 11:05 a.m. The trading finally started at about 11:30 a.m. Just before noon, Nasdaq said on one of its websites that it was "investigating an issue in delivering trade execution messages" from the Facebook IPO.
The stock's tepid initial gains appeared to rattle investors in other social media companies, especially those with ties to Facebook. Shares of those companies tumbled shortly after the world's largest social network made its market debut.
One of the biggest losers was Zynga Inc., whose shares were halted shortly after Facebook began trading. The company is responsible for the popular FarmVille and Mafia Wars games played on Facebook and it relies on the social networking site for the bulk of its revenue.
According to a Nasdaq website, Zynga's stock was halted at 11:37 a.m. then resumed trading at 12:27 p.m., only to be halted again at 12:29 p.m. It then resumed again at 1:35 p.m.
Shares of the San Francisco-based company, which went public in December, initially dropped $1.19, or 14 percent, to $7.08 before rebounding and were at $7.59 early in the afternoon. The initial drop easily passed the company's previous low of $7.34.
Elsewhere in the sector, shares in Groupon Inc. was off 73 cents, or almost 6 percent, to $11.68, after tumbling to $11.33 right after Facebook shares started trading.
Since going public in November, the Chicago-based online deals company's shares have traded between $9.63 and $31.14.
Shares of Linkedin Corp. also tumbled as much as 8 percent to $96.60 in morning trading, before climbing back to $102.75 later in the session.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based online professional networking service, which went public last year, is probably the closest thing to Facebook Wall Street has seen.
