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What cratered quicker: Menlo Park or 10 Downing Street? Thursday was a disaster for the tech company and for Boris Johnson, and all eyes will be on both venues today to see if there’s more disaster to gawk at.

WOULD THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE DOWNING STREET PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS? Four of Johnson’s most senior staff quit within hours Thursday: his chief of staff, head of policy, head of communications and the most senior civil servant in the building. Let’s hope the intern showed up for work today, otherwise the place will be looking fairly empty.

PEAK FACEBOOK — META STARES DOWN BIGGEST SHAREHOLDER LOSS IN HISTORY … AND NOW FACES A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION: Around $250 billion was wiped off Meta’s valuation Thursday as investors pummeled it for a drop in Facebook user numbers. The overall drop for the day settled at $232 billion when the market closed: around half of what the entire New York Stock Exchange lost on its worst trading day ever in 1987.

What’s really happening at Meta is a reckoning over Facebook: The calculus has shifted for the company, which previously breezed past even multibillion-dollar antitrust fines. Suddenly, instead of the benefit of the doubt, it’s now all doubt and no benefits. There’s now a cash value attached to the reputational hits the company has taken for five consecutive years since the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

What now for the $30 billion-poorer Mark Zuckerberg? It won’t be getting any easier. Metaverse investments aren’t cheap, and scrutiny is ramping up from every angle (and so is the billionaire competition: Jeff Bezos’ wealth rose $20 billion Thursday).

Reality check 1: A big tech company can lose revenue or relevance for years and still do fine, just ask IBM. The company, founded in 1911, had “negative revenue growth” for 22 quarters in a row until March 2021 but is still one of the world’s largest companies and employs more people than Facebook.

Reality check 2: Meta’s investors don’t want it to be IBM. In addition to its multibillion-dollar metaverse investment costs, Facebook faces antitrust and privacy hurdles everywhere it looks. It’s not merely regulators gunning for the company: Apple is determined to keep it on a leash via its stricter privacy standards, which restrict the company’s data collection practices and caused a $10 billion hit to Meta’s latest earnings. As my colleague David Pierce at Protocol writes: “It’s not Facebook’s world anymore.”

Reality Check 3: It’s not only cash that’s at stake. Meta faces its first criminal prosecution in Australia at a hearing scheduled March 28, over allegations by Andrew Forrest, Australia’s richest man, who says that Facebook breached Australian antimoney laundering laws by allowing the spread of cryptocurrency cons. Forrest alleges Facebook was "criminally reckless" in not doing more to halt the ads, which featured his likeness and first appeared in early 2019. Forrest complained to Facebook starting in 2019, and also launched civil proceedings in California, where Facebook is headquartered.

NATO’S STOLTENBERG WILL HEAD NORWAY’S CENTRAL BANK: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will become Norway’s new central bank chief after his NATO term ends Sept. 30, the country’s government said today.

JOIN GLOBAL INSIDER AT THE DENVER DEMOCRACY SUMMIT: Feb. 10 and 11. RSVP to watch online.

CHINA CORNER

OLYMPICS — WHY IS THE U.N. ATTENDING? The U.N. answer is that officials from more United Nations members are attending than boycotting, and China is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council: Beijing provided a vote Guterres depended on for his election, and a vote he needs to get anything substantial done. America’s U.N. envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “privately discouraged U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres from attending the Beijing Olympics. But when the U.N. chief made it clear he intended to go, she asked him to at least raise concerns about China’s human rights record,” Foreign Policy reported. Guterres is promising nothing.

AND WHAT IS WITH THE “CLOSED LOOP”? It’s fair enough that Olympic organizers have strict protocols to keep Covid out. But the story of Kim Meylemans, a Belgian skeleton racer kept in isolation despite testing negative three times for Covid, after an initial positive test on arrival in China, sends a clear message: The Olympics can’t change China. Beijing’s new message: We’ve arrived, get used to it.

NBC COUNTER-PROGRAMMING: The Olympic broadcaster featured a strong condemnation of China by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in its preview coverage Thursday night, and this morning dived in again, discussing Xinjiang genocide, diploimatic boycotts, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping meeting and contested geopolitics before the Opening Ceremony was even underway.

TOUGH TRADE: Jonathan Hackenbroich, Filip Medunic and Pawel Zerka have published a toolkit for the EU to get more of a policy spine on heavy foreign policy issues, including the coercive tactics of the Chinese government against Lithuania and Slovenia, and energy coercion by Russia. Their proposals include an EU Anti-Coercion Instrument and an EU Resilience Office for economic security.

FALTERING HEALTH LEADERSHIP: A new Council on Foreign Relations report by Yanzhong Huang concludes that China’s bid for global health leadership is faltering, “the zero-COVID strategy will be extremely costly and highly dangerous” in that Omicron and its sub-variants could easily spiral out of control.

The report comes on the heels of a new index from Eurasia Group that measures the economic impact of Beijing's zero-tolerance approach to Covid, the organization also rates the policy as the top risk to global growth in 2022.

Xi needs to project strong growth and high stability ahead of October’s Chinese Communist Party Congress, where he hopes to secure a lifetime presidential appointment but those two objectives conflict because of Covid.

VIRTUAL STATE OF CONTROL: One of Beijing’s next tasks is to build a metaverse with Chinese characteristics. It’s one tech field where China could beat the West.

UKRAINE CORNER

Global Insider has served a lot of Ukraine in recent weeks, so here’s today’s diet version.

U.S. officials said Russia is planning to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine by releasing a staged video depicting attacks by Kyiv military forces.

Xi joined Vladimir Putin in opposing further NATO expansion at a meeting today in Beijing, reviving a complaint that NATO perpetuates “the ideological approaches of the Cold War.”

Listen to the interview of Global Insider and POLITICO’s David Herszenhorn with Estonian PM Kaja Kallas on the Ukraine crisis.

What’s next for American troops? There are 8,500 troops on alert in the U.S. and Slovakia, and the three Baltic countries have said they will be happy to have more U.S. troops stationed on their territory (only around 200 are stationed in Baltic countries today out of a total of 1,000 NATO troops). There are 4,000 in Poland, including a National Guard combat team from Washington state that could move quickly into any Baltic state, likewise with troops from Germany. Hungary, which borders Ukraine, said it’s not interested in more troops.

EU — ANTITRUST FOUNDATIONS ARE SHAKING: The Commission hadn’t lost a big antitrust case in more than 20 years, but now faces a string of losses. First a $15 billion tax judgment against Apple was overturned in court, now the EU’s General Court (the bloc’s second-highest court) has left egg on the face of EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager, who hadn't even taken up her post in Brussels when a $1.2 billion antitrust fine — now annulled — was levied against Intel in 2009. The next dominoes to fall could be Vestager’s record $5 billion Google antitrust penalty, and a $1 billion fine against Qualcomm.

“The Commission’s analysis is incomplete and does not make it possible to establish to the requisite legal standard,” the court said Wednesday, echoing a criticism levied against the Commission by many American-based companies and lawyers. “This ruling is likely to have an impact on how the court looks at other cases,” said Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform.

ASEAN — WHAT ARE THE COSTS OF HUN SEN’S MYANMAR POLICY? Cambodia’s self-styled peacemaker prime minister (he’s been in power since 1985, and kept power through a coup in 1997), was the first foreign head of government to visit Myanmar since the February 2021’s military coup. As the 2022 head of the Association of South East Asian Nations, he’s doing nothing to broker either a compromise or a return to democracy, writes Charles Dunst.

CANADA — O’TOOLE OUT AS CONSERVATIVE LEADER: After leading Conservatives to their third consecutive election loss, 73 of 118 MPs voted against Erin O’Toole’s leadership, installing Candice Bergen (the politician, not the actor) as interim leader.

COSTA RICA — WIDE OPEN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, 25 CANDIDATES: The leading candidate to take charge of the Central American country is former President José María Figueres, a centrist making a comeback. He is first in polls, but with just 17 percent support.

FOOD SECURITY — FOOD PRICES HIT 17-YEAR HIGH: A U.N. report out Thursday outlines rising prices across meat, dairy, cereals and vegetables — the result of supply chain and energy supply problems. The last time prices approached this level, the spikes contributed to uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

NEW PODCAST EPISODE — SPOTLIGHT ON PANAMA

Little Panama has big ambitions: Panama’s government is making a play to boost democracy in its Central American neighborhood, via a new Alliance for Development in Democracy. The country’s foreign minister, Erika Mouynes, also takes us behind the scenes of her effort to solve the problems caused by an explosive rise in people smuggling through her territory, and explains how Panama wants to use its canal leverage to force the shipping industry to go green.

HOW MIAMI BECAME THE MOST IMPORTANT CITY IN AMERICA: Covid made Miami because it was warm, and “because the country became a frivolous, regulation-free, climate-doomed tax haven dominated by hot microcelebrities,” according to Joel Stein.

WOULD YOU SPEND $4 MILLION ON A PIECE OF METAVERSE “REAL ESTATE”: Or is that fake estate? An entity called Sandbox is the market leader in selling metaverse “land,” including a $4.3 million plot to Republic Realm, per digital lender SoFi. Sandbox has a project called Fantasy Islands “that offers boats, jet skis, and villas. Investors say they’re on the lookout for the metaverse equivalent to Rome, Paris, New York City, and San Francisco.”

SLOW JOE: HURRY UP, ALREADY! U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) have written to President Joe Biden to insist he quickly fill ambassadorial vacancies in the Indo-Pacific. Those without even a nominee include Thailand, Philippines and ASEAN. Read the letter.

U.S. — ASEAN SUMMIT: It’s tentatively penciled in for March 22, though obviously harder to pull off when there’s no ambassador to help. Global Insider’s advice: don’t be surprised if the date shifts.

BRAIN FOOD 

SHORT READ: The American female ISIS battalion leader: Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former teacher from Kansas, is alleged to have trained an all-female ISIS battalion in Syria, by Josh Meyer and Bart Jansen.

SHORT READ: Dr. Oz rails against China, but he made millions there, write Daniel Lippman and Holly Otterbein. 

DOCUMENTARY: Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story. A feminist pioneer, derided as a poor writer, queen of sleaze, and little sister of Joan.

DOCUMENTARY: The Rise of the Nazis — how democracy died in just four years, after being destroyed from within; from the BBC.

Thanks to editor John Yearwood, Charles Dunst and Hannah Farrow