I woke up this morning to learn that I missed the biggest disruption the Web 2.0 world had ever experienced. For a few hours last night UK time, some of the most popular sites on the web mysteriously went black. For an eerie stretch, there were no flat-swaps on Craig’s List, no gamer gossip on GameSpot, Second Lifers who collect a weekly stipend had to go without. Technorati and Typepad? Kaput!

What could cause such a disturbance? An act of digital sabotage? A technical glitch with the internet, falling over under the weight of so many Twitter messages? Perhaps. A DNS server somewhere went down? Nope. It was an outage at 365 Main, a datacentre in downtown San Francisco that provides the juice to scores of well-known dot-coms.

But why!? How could this happen!? Those who could still blog ran out some highly entertaining theories, like this carefully measured piece of journalism from the tech blog Valleywag:

“The cause? You won't believe it. A source close to the company says: ‘Someone came in s***faced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and f***ed up a lot of stuff. There's an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum,’” Valleywag reported in a story entitled “A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about”.

Later, Valleywag reported an angry mob had formed outside 365 Main, suggesting that bloggers with some urgent posts still yet to be sent were baying for blood.

The real culprit emerged shortly afterwards. It was a power outage in the city caused by “equipment failure”. And the angry mob? Well, those were just employees queuing up for a badge-check to get back in the building.

Could you imagine the stories we could read if Valleywag only commuted on the London Underground every day? Headlines like: “Circle Line shocker! Train route actually ends at Edgware Road, stopping far short of an actual circle” would surely get the slovenly public transport autocrats on their feet.

The hysterical early reportage that came out of yesterday’s outage is rather benign stuff. There are now more than 500 blog posts in multiple languages dedicated to the matter, most of which carry the rather dull, but truthful explanation behind the power outage. But the drunken, rampaging employee explanation is no doubt the most read and most cited version of events, even if it has little bearing on reality.

Still, it’s a nice traffic coup delivered by a clever headline and a provocative arrangement of details that may or may not contain a shred of truth – a formula perfected by tabloid journalists long ago. In the cutthroat business that small, indy tech bloggers find themselves in, a highly trafficked story can literally keep the site financed for another month. Thus, running with the headline about the drunk becomes a no-brainer business decision. As an editorial decision it could be far more costly, measured in lost credibility.

As an avid reader of tech blogs, I often wonder: what kind of editorial decision making goes into the publication of so many flimsily sourced, fantastical news stories? When it’s a lone blogger staring at a screen, there is evidently no internal editorial debate. It’s up to the public to vet. This is not journalism, but rather there’s a word for this that even the rampaging drunk would comprehend: propaganda.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com