Federal Reserve officials found themselves staring down a “profoundly uncertain” economic outlook, on top of a financial market meltdown, when they chose to slash interest rates to near zero in mid-March.

Minutes from the Fed’s March 15 meeting, released on Wednesday, offer a glimpse at the conversations behind the central bank’s early response to economic fallout from the coronavirus. Officials had made an emergency rate cut — their first since 2008 — just weeks earlier at an unscheduled March 3 meeting. They followed that up by slashing borrowing costs to rock-bottom on a Sunday evening while rolling out a giant bond-purchasing program aimed at calming troubled markets.

“All participants viewed the near-term U.S. economic outlook as having deteriorated sharply in recent weeks and as having become profoundly uncertain,” according to minutes from the meeting. Officials also “noted that financial markets had exhibited extraordinary turbulence and stresses.”

The Fed’s March move came as mounting concerns about potential economic devastation from the coronavirus thrust Wall Street into turmoil, causing trading in usually deep and liquid markets — including that for Treasury securities — to gum up. The minutes underline that the financial disorder, paired with uncertainty about the broader economic outlook, drove officials to act.