Every programmer knows it: the dreaded infinite loop. You have a little piece of code that gets the wrong input and starts repeating, over and over again. Computers being kind of fast, an innocuous few lines of code can execute millions of times an hour, sending the system of the network into "conniptions," which is the technical term used by all good programmers.
Such was the fate of Facebook for a few hours yesterday, which had a rogue piece of code bring down the entire system. While there is a movie already out about the start of the Facebook empire, it occurred to me what we need is a Facebook disaster movie. The script would be easy to pound out--start with a line up of aging, past their prime movie stars of the sort that were trotted out for classic disaster movies like Airplane, add in the pathos and horror of not being able to post that you just brushed your teeth or had a Hot Pockets burrito for breakfast, and do a lot of fast cuts to people whose entire lives were ruined because they could not post comments like "You go, girl" to Britney Spears' Facebook page, and you have some real movie magic. I predict it will go straight to DVD--but there would still be a one month delay before you watch it instantly on Netflix.