Nasdaq (£26 million) in compensation for financial firms that suffered losses during the IPO, which will largely be made up of discounted trading fares. However, the payback plans have received harsh criticism, where some trading firms have said that the $40 million is a fraction of the hundreds of millions lost in the moments following the flotation.

Furthermore, operating rival New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has released a statement claiming that if the discounted trading fees plans are approved, this would result in unfair practice and equates to the industry subsidising Nasdaq's mistakes.

"We believe it would be wholly inconsistent with fair practice and an undue burden on competition to allow Nasdaq to use pricing and other machination as a guise for fairly compensating those impacted by the Facebook IPO issues," said NYSE.

"Such a tactic would potentially strongly incentivise customers to divert order flow to Nasdaq in order to receive compensation to which they are entitled, and allow Nasdaq to reap benefit from market share gains they would not have otherwise received."

NYSE believes that this would establish a "harmful precedent that could have far reaching implications for the markets, investors and the public interest".