Shortly before 1:00 am on March 8, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER took off from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing China. On board were 227 passengers (two thirds of whom were Chinese) and 12 Malaysian crew. Shortly after takeoff, the plane's transponder and automatic messaging systems went down (or were shut off) and the plane made a preprogrammed turn off course, heading west back over the Malay peninsula and out to the Indian Ocean. By the time MH370 was an hour overdue in Beijing, Malaysia Airlines announced that it had lost contact with the flight.

Not all of that information was immediately known to search and rescue teams, however, and for four days, teams scoured the Gulf of Thailand in search of the lost plane before efforts shifted west. For more than two weeks, a vast international effort of commercial and military planes and ships from China, Japan, Australia, Great Britain, the United States and other countries searched in vain for any sign of the lost flight. Satellite imaging companies even put high-resolution images of the search area online in an effort to crowdsource the search efforts, inviting anyone and everyone to look for clues. Meanwhile, theories on what happened to the plane ran the gamut from cockpit fire to hijacking to pilot suicide.

Eventually, the discovery of what appeared to be wreckage far to the west of Perth, Australia focused efforts in southern Indian Ocean, in very rough water some 10,000 feet deep. Further satellite data from a UK company called Immarsat used complex mathematical data based off of the plane's last known signals to piece together a possible flight path. At this point, MH370 could have been on a path that lead it as far north as central Asia, but the Indian Ocean appeared more likely. The Malaysian government had seen enough, and on March 24, Prime Minister Najib Razak formally announced that based on satellite data, the last known position of MH370 was too far from any safe landing place, and that the plane must have crashed in the water, resulting in a total loss of the craft and the 239 people on board.