When it comes to the stock market, America’s technology giants have become a harbinger of more pain to come.

If Facebook, Apple or Google looked shaky this year — as investors worried about growth, regulation or mismanagement — the rest of the market felt it. In recent weeks, as these companies have succumbed to concerns about the global economy, slowing profits or privacy concerns, they have led the decline in stocks.

Now, technology companies are dragging stocks into an ominous territory that investors have not seen in nearly a decade: a severe decline known as a bear market.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq closed on Friday at 6332.99, down almost 22 percent from its August peak, meaning it has officially entered a bear market. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones industrial average, both of which also include the biggest tech companies, are not far behind after falling 17.5 percent and 16.3 percent from their respective highs. After a month of heavy losses, stocks are on track for their worst year since 2008.

Bear markets in stocks are rare but have the power to spread gloom through the economy. In the last 20 years, there have been only two — one that began with the financial crisis in 2007, and the other that started with the dot-com bust in 2000. Market downturns can gather steam even without strong evidence that economic and corporate fundamentals are weakening.

“It’s kind of a feedback loop,” said Robert Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University. “What’s happening right now, we’ve seen some declines, and that emboldens some pundit to say, ‘This is it.’ They get attention, it puts thoughts in people’s minds and they start thinking, ‘Maybe I should exit.’”

The Nasdaq is not the only group of stocks in such distress. The Russell 2000 index, which tracks shares of smaller companies, entered a bear market earlier this week. Seven of the S&P 500’s 11 industrial sectors are also at the level, led by energy stocks, which are down 28 percent from their highs earlier this year. That’s in large part because oil has been in a bear market since November.

If the broader stock market declines by more than 20 percent this year, it would end what was, by some measures, the longest bull run in history. From March 2009 until its peak in September, the S&P 500 surged 333 percent, a rally that provided a silver lining to the lackluster years that followed the financial crisis of 2008. Investors enjoyed trillions of dollars of gains from the stock market.

Those profits are not close to being wiped out. The stock market is still well above where it was even at the start of 2017. But the longer bear markets last, the more pessimism they spread.

If stock portfolios stagnate, consumers may cut their spending. And bear markets can reverberate through corporate America. The dot-com bust of the early 2000s contributed to a wider bear market and investors were wary of technology stocks for years. When stocks slump, chief executives slow investment in new projects and avoid decisions that investors might decide are too risky, which can dampen economic growth.

Companies thinking of issuing public stock for the first time may hold off. Lyft and Uber, ride-hailing companies, are considering initial public offerings. They may have to delay those deals if the market stays in a funk.

The mood in the markets can change. The most recent bear markets have not lasted as long as some others in the past. During the two previous bear markets, the Federal Reserve acted quickly to stimulate the economy by slashing interest rates. Investors came to believe that corporate profits would recover and dived back into stocks.

The current stock plunge is taking place at a time when the central bank is signaling that it will keep raising interest rates because the economy remains strong, with unemployment near 50-year lows. But on Friday, an influential Fed policymaker said the central bank would keep a close eye on financial markets as it set interest rates.

“We’re going to go into the new year with eyes wide open, willing to read the data, listen to what people are saying, and to reassess the economic outlook,” John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview with CNBC.

The sudden downturn in technology stocks has many of the attributes of the sell-offs that periodically smash hot sectors in the stock market. But it also signifies how investors have taken a dimmer view of corporate America and the broader economy.

As recently as this summer, they were still piling into superstar companies like Apple and Amazon, in the belief that they stood to make huge profits as they transformed the worlds in which they operated. In August, Apple’s stock market value exceeded $1 trillion, a feat no other publicly traded American company had achieved. A month later, Amazon reached the same milestone.

They are far below those levels now. Apple is now worth around $715 billion. Amazon has lost nearly a third of its value since hitting its high, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is down 23 percent.

Trade tensions and a possible slowdown in the global economy are prompting investors to wonder whether technology companies will grow as fast as expected. Expectations that iPhone sales in China could slow eroded Apple’s value, while Facebook’s slip-ups over data privacy and misinformation have drawn scrutiny from angry governments and made investors nervous.

“You can’t grow at huge percentages forever,” Scott Wren, senior global equity strategist at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said of the tech sell-off. “Plus, I think that whether it’s regulation, whether it’s fear of the global slowdown, those kinds of things have played into it.”

And there is also the simple fact that they had risen so far so fast. When fear descends on the market, investors often sell the shares that have gone up the most, and at its August high, the Nasdaq was up more than 50 percent from the date on which President Trump was elected.

“Too many people had piled on the same side of the boat,” said Lori Calvasina, head of United States equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets in New York. “Typically when that happens, the boat tips over.”

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