The two-week stock market rally in technology, among other sectors of the economy, came to a screeching halt Friday as the U.S. Bureau of Labor issued its monthly jobs survey.

Computer companies on the Nasdaq Thursday closed, in aggregate, up by 6.07 percent for the year while companies in the tech/media/telecom sector of the New York Stock Exchange closed up by 5.47 percent for the year. But by Friday afternoon, all major exchanges were down for the day with tech leaders including Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle and Google trading below their Thursday close.

Even if markets make last-minute gains before closing for the weekend, Friday's news dumps cold water on what had been burgeoning confidence in the economy.

The labor poll results that came out Friday were not pretty. Nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in June, with on balance only 18,000 people hired (including all gains and losses in nonfarm sectors), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.2 percent, the labor bureau reported.

Though "professional and technical" jobs did incrementally better than other sectors, with a total of 24,000 hirings, the overall news was much worse than expected.

"It caught everybody offguard, simply because most of the other indicators that came out recently over the last couple of weeks on employment suggested that the numbers would be quite strong, between say 150,000 and 200,000," said economist Nariman Behravesh, in an interview with the "Daily Ticker" sponsored by Yahoo Finance.

Payroll processor ADP, for example, reported earlier this week that private employers added 157,000 jobs last month. Reports like that helped fuel confidence in the economy and sparked a market rally over the past few weeks. The Dow Industrials index last week rose 648 points, or 5.4 percent, its greatest gain in two years. The close of trading Thursday marked seven out of eight days of gains for all major exchanges, helping to bring shares of tech vendors back into positive territory for the year.

Market reports on IT this week continued with good news for the sector. Enterprise software is in particularly good shape, according to forecasts. For example, Gartner on Thursday forecast global software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue to reach US$12.1 billion in 2011, a 20.7 percent increase from 2010. SaaS will continue to experience healthy growth, Gartner said, projecting worldwide revenue

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