Welcome back to Packet Trace. I am Wei Liang Choo. Last week we followed a billion dollars out of Dhaka. This week we go back much further, to the evening of 2 November 1988, when the internet connected a few tens of thousands of machines. A graduate student at Cornell releases a program from a computer at MIT. It is designed to copy itself quietly from machine to machine and count how many there are. One line of logic is wrong, and by morning computers across the United States are so overloaded that researchers are pulling the plugs out of the wall. In this episode we look at how it spread, how it was stopped by people on the phone to each other, and why this is the night my job was invented. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.