January 3, 2008

Prank shuts down schools IT system

It just shows you how things can move very quickly on the net, when a bored student at the Big Spring High School in Pennsylvania, US, posted a hoax on a certain site named uploadgeek, innocent enough you may think, but this hoax got so many peoples backs up that what happened next no one could have predicted.

It was December 16th when a posting appeared that showed that the school was willing to punish any student with two hours detention if they used Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, well that was enough to get it onto Digg and from there the story exploded across the internet.

The schools website hits rose from less than a 1,000 to over 90,000 the next day and the schools email inbox was filling up faster that the system could handle, eventually the system was shutdown to save it from crashing, and a real school letter posted on Digg and anywhere else they could find. The next day things were back to normal for the school, but maybe not for the student I suspect!

Source [Guardian]