Black Thursday

The Information Plague of October 20, 2229 CE, called “Black Thursday” by the media. The plague started as a prank by a group of information science post doctoral fellows at Carnegie Mellon University. An extremely agile mega virus that emulated Ebola, it was targeted at a competing group in the McNealy-Gates Information Sciences Laboratory. Launched at 13:15:04.13527 UTC, by 13:15:04.13546 UTC the 128 Byte program called “Gracehopper” jumped the university firewall and within an hour brought down every node on Internet31. Commerce halted. Over 100 million people died in the resulting transportation failures, power failures, lootings and mob violence.