In 1988, a graduate student launched an experimental script to measure the size of the internet, and a tiny programming oversight caused it to accidentally replicate out of control — infecting ten percent of all connected computers in hours and creating the world's first massive digital crisis. (opens in new tab)

At 8:30 in the evening on November 2, 1988, a 23-year-old computer science graduate student at Cornell University ran a small program from a terminal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had written the program himself. He believed it would do something interesting and harmless — silently spread across the early internet, count how […]