In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001. Nearly all US news websit

In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001. Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.