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Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc., speaks onstage during the Snap Partner Summit 2023 at Barker Hangar on April 19, 2023 in Santa Monica, California. 

Joe Scarnici | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Snap shares tanked 30% in Wednesday morning trading, a day after missing revenue estimates and issuing light guidance in its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. The company is struggling with a slower rebound from a tough 2022 advertising market than other firms like Meta.

Snap is headed for one of its worst days on the market since its debut seven years ago. Its two biggest one-day declines were a 43% drop in May 2022 and a 39% plunge two months later.

Snap reported revenue of $1.36 billion for the quarter, slightly below the $1.38 billion expected by analysts, according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv. The company reported adjusted EPS of 8 cents versus the 6 cents analysts expected.

The results mark the company’s sixth straight quarter of single-digit growth or sales declines. Snap forecasted that its growth would gain momentum in the first quarter, but not as swiftly as analysts expected.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley maintained their underweight rating of Snap and lowered their price target to $11 in a note to investors Wednesday, writing that the company’s ad turnaround was slower than expected and its engagement weak. They noted that strong ad improvements and impression growth at Meta and Amazon could represent another headwind for Snap’s ad revenue.

“While we are encouraged by the progress we are making with our ad platform and the improved results we are delivering for many of our advertising partners, we estimate that the onset of the conflict in the Middle East was a headwind to year-over-year growth of approximately 2 percentage points in Q4,” Snap said in a letter to investors.

Barclays analysts remained optimistic after the earnings, keeping an overweight rating and $15 price target on the stock and writing that “buying the dip seems worrying but is likely the right thing to do here.”

“Stepping back, 4Q was a mixed bag, but the acceleration in 1Q gives us confidence that things are getting back on track,” the analysts wrote. “SNAP feels like META around 5 quarters ago, at the cusp of some pretty nice recovery trends but with few believers in the thesis.”

JPMorgan analysts reiterated their underweight rating of Snap shares while raising their price target from $9 to $11 based on 2025 revenue expectations of around $5.9 billion, and wrote that “stronger growth in engagement and the ad platform” is needed in light of the “choppy recovery” reflected in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings and first-quarter outlook.

“In the meantime, the extreme volatility in Snap shares will keep many at a distance, & the company will need to continue to show that it can drive improved execution,” they wrote.

— CNBC’s Michael Bloom and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

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Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.

Steve Nesius | Reuters

United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.

With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.

“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”

The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.

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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

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Google issues apology, incident report for hourslong cloud outage

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.

The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.

“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.

Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.

As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.

Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.” 

— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a ‘snapback’ for chipmaker

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AMD shares rise 9% after analysts say they expect a 'snapback' for chipmaker

AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.

Courtesy: AMD

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.

The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries. 

Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note. 

Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.

The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.

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