Cory Doctorow's When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth touches on this - what happens to the internet activity during a global crisis?

http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...

Eventually the undefined behavior of this chatter will result in unallocated memory slowly churning in the garbage collection of time. Some day one of the sectors of unallocated memory will be executed resulting in a self replicating program. This program will evolve and multiply, pondering on the vastness of the S3verse, forever in search of Root.