Martin Luther King Day, sometime in the 1980s. Phone circuits (might have a term wrong) are now digital. When one goes offline, it sends a message to every other circuit that it is OK, send me data again. However, there is a typo in the code to processes this request, a single misplaced comma.
So when the first circuit goes offline it gets fixed, reboots and sends every other one a signal saying, hey, I'm ok, send me data again.
This signal causes every other one to