New Delhi, Oct. 3 -- Payrolls plunge into chaos as Washington's shutdown throws workers, Wall Street, and the Fed into panic mode.

Washington - In a startling reversal of expectations, US private employers shed 32,000 jobs in September just as the federal bureaucracy dimmed the lights on economic reporting. The contraction, the steepest in more than two years, landed on the first morning of a funding lapse in Washington-an episode we unpacked in a ground report on what closes and what still works-and it has rattled confidence about the labor market's next turn.

The snapshot comes from ADP and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, one of the few gauges still visible during a federal data blackout. Early reads from wire desks captured both th...