Shares of big tech companies slid on Monday, with stocks such as...

Shares of big tech companies slid on Monday, with stocks such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon dragging the S&P 500 to its lowest close since late July.

The benchmark index fell 1.3 per cent, making it more than halfway to an official correction — when stocks drop 10 per cent from their all-time high. Some of the index’s tech heavyweights propelled the decline.

Facebook was among the five worst-performing stocks on the S&P 500, declining 4.9 per cent as its Instagram, WhatsApp and namesake Facebook services suffered outages.

Pessimism about the company and the broader tech industry has been mounting in US financial markets in recent weeks, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down 7.5 per cent from a record high hit last month. It fell 2.1 per cent on Monday.