Snow Crash
Hiro Protagonist is an 80s-edgy hacker ninja who works for a mafia-owned pizza shop chain. JT is a 90s-edgy punk teenage girl who does courier service on call. Together, they save the world from an alien virus that can infect not just computers, but bodies too, and worse still, infect minds... "Snow Crash".
Snow Crash in Snow Crash
The "meta" in "metaverse" means "unbound by conventional limits of its' existence".
A metaverse - like the one that Mark Zuckerburg wanted to monetize - is a universe that is not bound to reality (and implied by stories like Snow Crash to be a virtual 3D world, as opposed to the 2D internet).
A metavirus - like the titular Snow Crash - is a hypothetical virus which has mastered all potential forms of transmission. In short, you see a QR code and - if you're familiar with their design methodology - you get a metavirus from that QR sticker. It could infect any computer, and then spread to users that understand which language it is trying to spread via. From there, imagine "bibles" that - if read - give you the virus. Not faithful? How about snorting some coke laced with alien Herpes? No? Well, you could always go online and read wikis. "In the event of a Containment Breach, this anomaly should be considered an active Cognitohazard." But seriously, it's a virus that is compatible with computers, genetic code, and - scariest of all - minds.
Wait a minute...
Memes are the real life version of that. Mostly harmless. That said, like Genes are for people and all biological lifeforms, Memes are the "genetic" materials of a society. This means that while Memes are actually harmless on an individual level, theoretically they can and do destroy societies when tampered with. Heavy stuff.
co.vid_19 and PLixel Modding
While the days of Hinobi gatekeeping modding capacity are over, malware is still a thing in Glitch Techs x RP because hackers existed in Glitch Techs.
As a result, in 2020 a digital pandemic began to spread from somewhere in China. While Snow Crash cannot directly infect people, the reason it was so dangerous that the internet was temporarily made read-only was because the virus can infect Tech Gauntlets, and thus the virus is capable of rewriting human minds. While nobody has been wiped who wasn't supposed to be, it was clear that the internet had to make a Gigapause until the virus could be properly removed from all devices. The Hexadecimal Vaccine, created by the company "Killabyte Anti-Malware", was the most successful of the attempts, though the virus seems to still linger in systems which have not received regular software updates, and periodically leak into the wider networks.
co.vid_19 was quickly traced back to it's origin, and identified as a failure of containment at a research lab in Wuhan owned by a dubious anti-virus company known as "瘟疫公司" or "Plague Inc." It is hypothesized that one of two former employees at the facility may have done it, either one Raymond "T-Bone" Kenny, or one Rache Bartmoss, though how two American scientists ended up working in China leaves the Parawatch forums grinding their teeth. To be fair, the US and China rarely would agree on such a false story if anything truly sinister was happening, so the most likely explanation is that somehow it is concealing information that could legitimately lead to mass panic. Given that this is a Glitch Techs fan RP, the secret in question is almost certainly because "okay, so, sometimes video game consoles glitch up in ways that are more than most people expect...".