Just yesterday, it looked like tech stocks were flying high after Meta rallied more than 20 percent on the heels of a strong earnings report. Then Google parent Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon all released their earnings after the bell, and the narrative quickly shifted. 

Alphabet, for example, reported a 34 percent drop in net income and its fourt consecutive decline in profits, in large part due to a slow down in digital advertising. The company stressed that its trying to get back onto firmer ground. “We’re on an important journey to re-engineer our cost structure in a durable way and to build financially sustainable, vibrant, growing businesses across Alphabet,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. This includes the recently announced layoff of 12,000 employees, or 6 percent of the company's total workforce. 

As for Apple, it reported a 5 percent drop in sales from the same period last year — its lowest sales since 2019 — and forecast that revenue would fall for the second quarter in a row, while stressing that iPhone sales would soon improve with the lifting of COVID-related restrictions in China. At the same time, CEO Tim Cook signaled that categories such as gaming and digital advertising would continue to struggle due to widespread economic uncertainty. 

Amazon arguably had it the worst on Thursday. The e-commerce giant reported its first unprofitable year since 2014 and its slowest-ever quarter of growth.  While a losing investment in electric automaker Rivian explains part of the drop, Amazon is facing headwinds across its businesses. One striking insight from the report was that Amazon Web Services, the company's highly profitable cloud business, missed expectations.  "We do expect to see some slower growth rates for the next few quarters," Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told shareholders. 

Microsoft has launched a premium version of Teams that integrates ChatGPT to apparently simplify meetings, including automatically generating meeting notes, recommending tasks, and supporting the creation of meeting templates. The company has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the owner of the AI chatbot that went public in December of last year.