SILICON VALLEY, Cali. — The Digital World and its lovable, all-powerful inhabitants ceased to exist early this morning due to an ISP’s bounced automatic bank withdrawal, according to those familiar with the situation.
“I just wanted to get away for a weekend,” tamer Taichi Kamiya explained. “Go for a hike, swim at the beach… you wouldn’t believe the screen time a DigiDestined teenager racks up. Coming back to that blank-white 404 page, though… Jesus. I’m freaking out. My friend Agumon literally evaporated from existence. We met entire nations of creatures, with personalities, and hopes, and dreams. We fought wars together. Wars. Plural. The fate of the universe hung in the balance. Oh god, I’ve let so many creatures die!”
The horror is attributed to the draconian business model of BargainIP.biz, a cheap provider all Digimon have lived on since 1999. BargainIP’s complaints hotline initially offered DigiDestined an automatic amends of two free months hosting and maintenance before quickly realizing that their accounting practices were “technically responsible” for genocide.
“Many are understandably upset,” a customer service representative admitted. “We appreciate your patience while we attempt to reverse the erasure of an entire civilization. It’s an inexact science. Trees currently load upside-down, water catches fire and several testers have spontaneously glitched into the ground in a never-ending plummet. The sky bleeds oil and there’s one T-posing Angemon that slowly glides towards us, screaming. Regardless, we’ve been working around the clock to resolve the issue. Hopefully, we can restore everyone’s digital friends with the same personalities and memories as before. Otherwise, they are all dead for nothing.”
Repairing the damage has been slow. While some Digimon have been restored by backup zip-disks found in programmers’ garages, others may be lost forever.
Don’t look at me,” human protector Gennai exclaimed. “I helped build the Digital World, for God’s sake! Everything ran perfectly pre-Y2K — that’s solid, incorruptible HTML 2 for you. Still, I’ll get blamed. The internet’s too complex these days. You don’t need fancy ‘cloud-based’ crap to fix backup issues — just a solid dial-up connection and 15 minutes on the right IRC server. Digivolve into someone who takes initiative. Ask Jeeves and sort it out!”
At press time, officials reminded users of the importance of occasionally printing out a photo of your Digimon so that you can appreciate it in the physical world.
