The massive clan of computer gremlins that has risen to prominence over the past few decades has had a major success this week.

Despite their early rise to power, and early accomplishments, it has become harder for them to create any significant disruptions in the world as security and understanding of computers has increased and led to better defences.

But after ten years of planning and at 12am GMT last Monday morning, they unleashed mayhem across the world.

It was begun with a small and simple program that was unintentionally developed by a hacker in India and was then adjusted and carefully attached to a number of well-known master programs as a sleeper.

When the program was finally activated all the monitors around the world began to blink to an unheard musical score. Scotland’s monitors blinked to Marie’s Wedding, Wales to Men of Harlech, Ireland to Molly Malone and England to Jerusalem. In another twist, English language computers in Switzerland blinked to William Tell, but Swiss language computers blinked to the Swiss Psalm.

The blinking lured the operators to try and work through to their settings to fix the problem but made it very difficult to get there and discover what was wrong.

Once the blinking was cured it was the signal for the cursor to visibly disappear from the screen although still in place, and more importantly, active. Unfortunately touch screen users had an advantage here with regards to accurately activating what they needed to repair the problem.

The third part of the attack then began. Following an alphabetical sequence, the programs wouldn’t open. First application A wouldn’t open and when the operator opened the program list in order to find the program itself, it would be missing. Once they re-installed the program, the original version would re-appear on the list meaning that the operator would then have to un-install one of the versions. Once A was sorted, it was the turn of program AB then AC and so on through B, C, D etc.

Due to the alphabetical nature of the mis-direction it wasn’t immediately apparent that there was still a problem for many users and this has led to an ongoing confusion which is a delight to all gremlins. The planning was executed brilliantly starting with a small and simple program kept back and well hidden to give it a chance to be initiated into ninety-five percent of the world’s computers.

The day chosen, a Monday, was chosen to initiate maximum office chaos, and the careful worldwide release to GMT time helped catch the whole world in one smooth sweep. The worldwide chaos is the greatest success ever for the gremlin communities, a genius in planning, and one not to be forgotten, no doubt, for centuries.

Byline Quothe the raven