In a day of red ink as markets retreated from record highs, tech stocks took a massive hammering Wednesday, in some cases more so than the rest of the market.

CNBC claimed this was the worst day for tech stocks since August 2011. The plunge was led, at least among the broad tech giants, by Amazon.com Inc. with a 6.2 percent decline. Microsoft Corp. fell 5.4 percent, Apple Inc. was down 4.6 percent and Alphabet Inc., Google LLC’s parent company, also dropped 4.6 percent.

Chipmakers fared even worse, with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. dropping 8.2 percent while Nvidia Corp. dropped 7 percent. But the contagion spread across the entire online world with Salesforce Inc., Twitter Inc., Intuit Inc. and others all reporting declines of about 7 percent.

The reason for the decline, the third-largest in absolute terms on the Dow Jones Industrial Average in history and the biggest on the Nasdaq since the British independence vote in 2017, is being attributed to a number of factors, including concerns coming into reporting season and rising interest rates.

“Shares seem to have started to reflect this more challenging backdrop just in the past few weeks, and we think we are headed into another choppy earnings season, hence we would be selective adding to positions,” Ross Sandler, senior internet analyst at Barclays, said in a note to investors quoted by Marketwatch.

“Stepping back, these corrections are normal, have happened regularly over the past decade, and will ultimately lead to the next leg higher, so we remain very constructive [over a] longer term,” Sandler added.

Whether stocks continue to drop is always speculation, of course. But after years of printing money and record low interest rates, the Federal Reserve has indicated that it intends to continue to increase interest rates as the U.S. continues to boom, and a constriction in money supply naturally concerns markets.

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