A closer look
The internet's first apocalyptic meltdown wasn't a malicious hack; it was just a garbage status update that went extremely viral. In 1980, the ARPANET—the military proto-internet—completely collapsed because of a single flipped bit in a routing node's hardware. This caused the node to broadcast a corrupted, high-priority status message. Every other node immediately passed it along, trapping the entire network in an infinite loop of updating its own status. It was the digital equivalent of an endless 'Reply All' email chain taking down the government.
