Corrupted Blood incident
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident#cite_ref-c.26vg_9-3
The Corrupted Blood incident was a video game glitch and virtual plague in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, which began on September 13, 2005, and lasted for one week. The epidemic began with the introduction of the new raid Zul’Gurub and its end boss Hakkar The Soulflayer. When confronted and attacked, Hakkar would cast a hit point-draining and highly-contagious debuff spell called Corrupted Blood on players.
In March 2007, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Bersheva, Israel, published an article in the journal Epidemiology that described the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr Balicer suggested that role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. In a follow-up article in the journal Science, the game Second Life was suggested as another possible platform for these studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contacted Blizzard Entertainment and requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics but was told that it was a glitch.