Relatives screamed and cried yesterday after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said new information confirmed that the missing jet had plunged into the Southern Indian Ocean with no hope of survivors.
(Some families, almost unbelievably, were reportedly informed by text message.)
Many will see the announcement as premature - China, for instance, understandably wants to see the evidence on which the statement was made - but certainly the intensity of the search off Australia hints at the plane's fate.
At the centre of this global drama have been not only the missing passengers, but those whose loved ones never arrived at their destination.
As the rest of the world constructed theories and debated possible outcomes, their focus remained firmly on the scenario that somehow the jet would be found with the passengers alive.
If the advice from officials yesterday was believed, those hopes were finally extinguished, perhaps bringing the first degree of closure to a mystery and human tragedy which has gripped people across the globe.
A multinational force of aeroplanes and ships continues to scour the search area for debris which could identify the location of the missing flight, which vanished from civilian radar screens on March 8 less than an hour after take-off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board.
In our hyper-connected world, it still seems barely comprehensible that a Boeing 777 could disappear without trace with no firm leads on its location for more than a week.
In the end it was some groundbreaking mathematics by British satellite company Inmarsat which narrowed the crash site down to a corridor several hundred kilometres wide in some of the roughest ocean in the world.
Inmarsat's efforts to refine the search area further were hampered by the fact that the satellite providing the data dates from the 1990s and is not GPS-equipped.
The lack of adequate tracking of aircraft has emerged as a consistent theme in the disappearance of MH370.
An Inmarsat spokesman pointed out that it would be easy, with a global agreement, to make direction and distance reporting compulsory: ''That could be done tomorrow.''
Such a system would have enabled the Malaysian authorities to provide a clarity which has been sadly missing as the search has progressed.
In the information vacuum left by the mystery of the jet's likely location, speculation mushroomed out of control.
It emerged that Malaysia may have had information suggesting the jet's likely change of course days earlier than it was released, meaning searchers had been wasting their time searching on the flight's intended path.
Chinese relatives yesterday lashed out, saying the Malaysian authorities and the airline had ''continually and extremely delayed, hidden and covered the facts, and attempted to deceive the passengers' relatives, and people all over the world''.
This statement carries a charge of raw emotion which is entirely understandable, but such concerns must be listened to and the facts carefully untangled if lessons are to be learnt.
In the short term, the Malaysian authorities could blunt further criticism by loosening their grip and allowing other countries more direct involvement.
What has been heartening has been the international response to the search effort.
At a time when international tensions have been rising, nations which often struggle to work together constructively have become part of a multi-nation fleet of aircraft and ships helping Australia scour the Southern Indian Ocean.
Yesterday, China was sending more vessels to the search area at the same time as the United States was dispatching a black box locator.
Japan and New Zealand are also there, and, in all, 26 nations have reportedly been involved in the search.
The race is now, it seems, to find the black boxes before their batteries run out and they cease sending location signals.
For the anguished families who are still reeling from yesterday's announcement, finding the wreckage will be of little comfort.
But the eyes of the world will stay south of Perth as searchers try to find and retrieve debris, and if and when they do, for investigations to continue to determine how the crash happened, and how to prevent it happening again.
