World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood Plague

In September 2005, a glitch in the online game World of Warcraft unleashed the infamous Corrupted Blood incident. A debuff from a raid boss accidentally spread beyond its intended area, infecting players' characters in major cities and causing a fast-moving digital plague. Healthy players abandoned populated areas, while infected ones were forced into self-imposed quarantines, and the chaos grew so realistic that epidemiologists later studied it as a model for how people might behave during an actual pandemic.

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