A group of investors and shareholders sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook, several years ago over a purported data breach in 2015 in which a third-party company gained access to the private information of tens of millions of users.

Meta had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the multi-billion dollar lawsuit but the high court instead ruled on Friday that it never should have taken up Meta's appeal, the Associated Press reported.

That means a prior Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling will stand and allow the suit against Meta to proceed to the merits phase.

Meta's appeal dismissed

The Supreme Court on Friday issued a one-page unsigned order in the case of Facebook Inc. v. Amalgamated Bank that included just one sentence and no further explanation of the court's opinion.

"The writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted," the court stated, meaning Meta's appeal should never have been accepted to begin with.

That also means that Meta's investors and shareholders can proceed with their lawsuit that alleges the company failed to fully disclose the potential risks of a breach of user data and privacy when third-party Cambridge Analytica purchased access to said data in 2015, some of which was then used by the firm to target voters in support of then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

When information about Cambridge Analytica's access to user data was made public in 2018, there was an intense backlash from opponents of then-President Trump, and the price per share of Meta's stock took two precipitous tumbles, which led to the lawsuit from shareholders.

In response to the ruling, per the AP, a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement that the company was disappointed with the court's opinion, and explained, "The plaintiff’s claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court."

The outlet also noted that aside from the lawsuit, Meta has already paid a steep price for what occurred, as it was hit with a $5.1 billion fine from federal regulators and reached a $725 million settlement with users who'd also filed a privacy-based lawsuit.

Justices were skeptical of Meta during oral arguments

SCOTUSblog reported that oral arguments in the case were held on Nov. 6 and the recurring theme was skepticism from nearly all of the justices to Meta's assertion that it had sufficiently warned shareholders about the potential risks to its stock price of a data and privacy breach becoming public knowledge.

Indeed, the plaintiffs argued that Meta had "improperly downplayed" such risks in statements made to investors after the company had become aware of what Cambridge Analytica had done but before that information became public knowledge and sparked substantial drops in the share price.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas remarked that "a reasonable person" might presume from Meta's statements that the company had never and would never suffer a data breach, while liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson likened the situation to a home seller generally warning a potential buyer about the possible risks of crime without mentioning that a recent rash of robberies had occurred in the neighborhood.

However, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to signal a reluctance to get involved in parsing the words of disclosures to shareholders from Meta or other companies, while conservative-leaning Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to suggest that it should be up to federal regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and not the courts, to determine how explicit and detailed a company's disclosures to shareholders should be.

It did not make sense to him for "the judiciary … to walk the plank on this … when the SEC could do it," and Kavanaugh further stated that "the SEC knows how to write regulations that require disclosure of past events. … Why not let the SEC do this if they want to?"