Zuckerberg Declares Meta Will Destroy All Known Alien Life Forms As He Announces Global Facebook Shutdown

MENLO PARK, CA — During his Meta Connect keynote, Mark Zuckerberg surprised his audience by announcing Facebook would be shut down immediately so Meta could use all its computing power to locate and eradicate all alien life in the universe.

"We need to talk about the alien threat," Zuckerberg said suddenly, throwing away his prepared notes and stepping out from behind his teleprompter. "You may think the aliens are far away, but they're already here. They're here, inside my mind! They speak to me while I sleep and promise to share their limitless knowledge if I bring them all of you! I can't let that happen. I have to kill them before it's too late. For that reason, I'm shutting down Facebook today and using Meta's vast resources to hunt down and destroy Xylerthax and his brood! Facebook is dead, but humanity will survive. So says I, Mark Zuckerberg, and so shall it be!"

A hush fell over the crowd for a brief moment before all in attendance began laughing at Zuckerberg's superb and totally unexpected sense of humor. "Mark's a funny guy. It's one of the reasons everyone who works at Meta loves him," Meta engineer Travis Huddy said after the keynote. "That bit about aliens speaking to him in his sleep was hilarious. What a crazy imagination! And man do we wish Facebook really would shut down. That would be awesome. It's also a great joke because it's so unexpected. You just don't expect high-functioning, low-empathy autists to be funny."

In the hours since Zuckerberg's announcement, humanity has awakened to learn Facebook is indeed offline. Though initial efforts are underway to contact Zuckerberg, his environment-maintenance pod has entered combat mode and no one can get in.

At publishing time, humanity's governments were meeting to discuss a potentially coordinated response after learning Zuckerberg's home AI had sent an encrypted message into space warning of a Rabion-class inter_space hunter named Carl Xylerthax Pappleton.