Today in Viral Internet: October 27
One date holds a fandom legend, the death notice of a beloved app, a forty four billion dollar takeover and two TikTok era formats. October 27 is loaded.
Red Shirt Guy Owns BlizzCon
At BlizzCon 2010, a World of Warcraft fan in a red shirt stepped to the microphone and calmly pointed out a lore mistake in front of the game developers, naming a dwarf character the panel had overlooked. The clip spread hard on October 27, 2010, hitting the front page of the gaming subreddit and landing on BuzzFeed the same day.
Blizzard answered in the best possible way. The company fixed the issue in the game and added a character called the Wildhammer Fact Checker, dressed in a red tunic, as a permanent nod to the fan who caught them slipping. It remains the gold standard for how a giant company should handle being corrected by its own community, with humour instead of ego.
Twitter Announces the End of Vine
On October 27, 2016, Twitter announced it would discontinue Vine, the six second looping video app it had bought in 2012 before the app even launched publicly in 2013. The news arrived the same day as word of a nine percent staff cut at Twitter, and the Vine team told users their existing clips would stay viewable and downloadable while the app wound down over the following months.
Vine had claimed more than two hundred million monthly viewers, and its constraint built a whole comedy language, jump cut storytelling, characters built in six seconds and punchlines with no wasted frame. Its stars scattered to YouTube and Instagram, and every short form platform working today, TikTok most of all, is running on ground Vine cleared first.
Musk Closes the Twitter Deal
The forty four billion dollar sale of Twitter to Elon Musk closed on October 27, 2022, ending months of offers, a poison pill defence, an attempt to walk away and a lawsuit in Delaware that forced the deal back onto the rails at fifty four dollars and twenty cents a share. Top executives including the chief executive and the chief financial officer were out the same day, and the stock was headed for delisting.
The viral image of the saga had landed a day earlier, when Musk walked into headquarters carrying a kitchen sink and posted the let that sink in joke, then changed his profile to Chief Twit. The bird is freed post followed as the deal closed. Within a year the platform had a new name, X, and the timeline culture hip hop runs on had been permanently rearranged.
The Bird Test Takes Over TikTok
On October 27, 2023, TikTok creator Alyssa, posting as alyssacardib, shared the Bird Test, a simple relationship check. When one partner points out something small, like a bird outside the window, the other partner response is the data. Engaging with the small moment signals attentiveness, while brushing it off signals distance. The video pulled hundreds of thousands of likes and sent couples across the app filming their own tests.
The idea was not new science wearing a costume. It echoed the Gottman Institute research on bids for connection, which found that couples who stay together respond to each other small bids most of the time, while couples who split respond far less often. TikTok did what TikTok does, it turned a research finding into a format anyone could run at the kitchen table.
Chipi Chipi Chapa Chapa Starts Its Run
Also on October 27, 2023, animator Kuwonn posted a short Boykisser animation on X set to a sped up fragment of Dubidubidu, a two decade old children song by Chilean singer Christell. The post gathered hundreds of thousands of views, and by December the sound had jumped to TikTok, where a looped clip of a cat moving its head along to the chant passed fifteen million views in days.
Christell herself leaned in, posting about a song from her childhood career going viral twenty years later and performing it again for the new audience. The whole run is a clean example of the modern viral chain, an old regional pop record, an animator remix, a pet video format, then the original artist arriving to collect a second career moment from a song she recorded as a small child.
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