LinkedIn plummets 44% after disappointing forecast

A jittery corporate America is clamping down on tech spending — and fresh, brutal evidence of that is slamming tech stocks.

Shares of LinkedIn plunged nearly 44 percent on Friday, as the professional-networking site gave a disappointing forecast after delivering worse-than-expected quarterly results.

Ditto for Tableau Software — one of the nation’s biggest business-analytics companies — whose shares tanked 49 percent in a single session after the firm warned this year’s revenue and profits would miss Wall Street’s expectations.

“If it wasn’t clear that the global economic slowdown is beginning to impact IT purchasing decisions before this week, [Tableau’s and LinkedIn’s results] should be the air horn that officially sounds the alarm,” Stifel analyst Tom Roderick wrote in a Friday note to clients.

“Winter is coming,” he added.

The stock storm swept up more than just the business-software crowd, driving the Nasdaq to its lowest levels since October 2014. The tech-heavy index led a broader selloff on Wall Street, dropping 146.41 points, or 3.25 percent, to 4,363.15.

The selloff swallowed shares of Amazon and Netflix — down 6.4 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively — which had both more than doubled their value last year.

It also hit Pandora (down 10 percent), Facebook (down 5.8 percent), Alphabet (down 3.4 percent), Tesla (down 7.3 percent) and Yelp (down 8.5 percent).

Some analysts have warned that “big data” and cloud-computing services are especially prone to an economic slowdown, as they are perceived as commodities vulnerable to pricing competition from big players including Amazon and Google.

Salesforce, the cloud-computing giant founded by Marc Benioff, saw its shares tumble 13 percent to $58.51 Friday with no news from the company.

Other casualties included Splunk (down 23 percent) and Workday (down 16 percent).

LinkedIn’s implosion slashed more than $10 billion from the company’s market capitalization — and slashed $1.2 billion from the net worth of Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s founder and 11-percent shareholder.

Hoffman, who has been fond of using his cash for political causes and scoring dinners at the White House, was worth $2.6 billion at Friday’s close, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.

With their stock screens bathed in red, stunned analysts apologized to clients, admitting they had been caught off-guard by the ugly news.

FBR analyst Daniel Ives called Tableau’s results a “major ‘gut punch,’ ” noting that the software giant had consistently beat and raised its financial forecasts in recent periods.

“We were wrong — we hope to do better in the future,” SunTrust analyst Robert Peck said in an apology note to clients on LinkedIn.

He downgraded his rating to neutral from buy and slashed his price target to $155 from $250.

LinkedIn shares on Friday lost $83.90 to close at $108.38.