Amazon, Alphabet Fall as Growth Engines Sputter, Spending Surges
- Market jitters, economic concerns leave little room for errors
- Americans’ use of the internet, social media, devices plateaus
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The growth engines of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc., the world’s largest internet companies, sputtered last quarter, and after weeks of stock market jitters, investors were in no mood to give them a pass. Shares of both tumbled.
Amazon, the biggest online retailer, reported a second consecutive quarter of sales that fell short of estimates -- the first back-to-back revenue miss in almost four years. The company on Thursday also gave a disappointing revenue and profit forecast for the busy holiday period. Even its highly profitable cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, didn’t grow as fast as it had in the previous three months.