Companies People Invested Money Dot.Com Talking Failure Lot

In the late 1990s, people invested a lot of money in "dot.com companies" (companies working online, named for the way we pronounce URLs ending in ".com"). Suddenly, companies became much more attractive if it used "e-" as a "prefix" (something that comes before a word) or ".com" as a "suffix (something that comes after a word) to its name.

That period became known as the "dot.com bubble," because people invested much more than the companies were actually worth, and eventually everything "fell apart" (stopped working). The "stock market" (the part of the economy where people buy and sell small pieces of ownership in companies) "crashed" (decreased very quickly), and many people "suffered" (experience financial loss, pain, and other negative consequences) in the dot.com "bust" (failure).

In the dot.com bust, many companies "went out of business," meaning they could not continue operating as a business because they had lost too much money. For example, eToys.com had a "share price" (the amount of money that one piece of ownership in a company can be sold for) of $80 in May 1999, but that number had "fallen" (decreased) to $1 in February 2001, when the company "declared bankruptcy" (made an official statement that it could not pay all the money it owed).

"In all" (overall), the dot.com crash caused technology companies to lose $5 trillion in "market value" (the total amount that all shares could be sold for) between March 2000 and October 2002. Businesses and individuals who had invested in technology companies and dot.coms lost a lot of money.