I've been an amateur astronomer since I was a kid (yes, one of those geeks who sits outside in the dark looking at the stars through a telescope) and random meteors can be seen on any night. If you're patient, you can see at least a few every hour. Most of these meteors (also called shooting stars) appear about as faint as the background stars and are caused by small rock fragments in space about the size of a grain of sand, burning up from friction with the Earth's atmosphere as the Earth moves along its orbit at a speed of tens of miles per second.
Very bright meteors are caused by larger pieces of rock, and the brightest ones which light up the sky all around and break up into glowing fragments that sometimes reach the ground as meteorites are caused by boulder sized rocks. I've seen perhaps a dozen of these in the past 30 years of stargazing and they are among the most beautiful sights that nature produces.
It was very beautiful. From the look of it, nothing reached the ground as a meteorite.