Investing.com – Shares of Snap fell more than 2% on Tuesday, after Instagram replicated Snapchat's popular messaging feature, which includes disappearing photos and videos alongside text.
Snap Inc (NYSE:SNAP) fell to a session low of $20.34, as rival social media app, Instagram announced that its users can send disappearing photos, videos and post reshares from other accounts.
It is not the first time that Instagram has decided to take a page out of the Snapchat playbook, after the photo and video sharing company in August 2016, copied Snapchat’s Stories formats, which displays photos from users in chronological order for 24 hours.
Instagram boasts a far larger group of monthly users at 600 million, compared to Snapchat, which has only amassed 158 million users.
The slump in Snap's share price coincided with a negative day on Wall Street, as the main three U.S. indexes remained on track to end the day in negative territory, after investors ditched risk assets amid rising geopolitical tensions.
The U.S decided to move a Navy strike group toward the Korean peninsula amid continued missile tests by North Korea.
President Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday, "North Korea is looking for trouble" and signalled that the U.S. is prepared to solve the problem on its own, should China decline to offer assistance.
Meanwhile, U.S.-Russia relations were subject to further strain, after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a message to Moscow on Tuesday denouncing Russian support for Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
The slump in U.S. equities came ahead of the first quarter earnings season, as Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo report results on Thursday before the US market opens.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded 0.08% lower at 20,641. The S&P 500 lost 0.23% and the Nasdaq Composite traded 0.31% lower at 5862.81.