Relive UK's first ever online flash mob

What happened?

The UK’s first ever online flash mob saw hundreds of colored hoppers invade one of the biggest sites on the Internet.

Flash mobs normally take place in the real world, when a large group of people suddenly converge in a public place and perform an unusual activity for a short while - normally to the surprise and confusion of passers-by - before disappearing as suddenly as they appeared.

The first flash mobs were started in New York in 2003 as a social experiment, but their popularity boomed. Famous events have included a silent disco at London Underground stations, where participants were encouraged to dance wildly to their own personal music player, and a mass pillow fight which took place in 25 cities around the world simultaneously.

The online flash mob which caught Yahoo!'s users by surprise saw thousands of individually designed coloured space hoppers bounce across the screen for 40 seconds at exactly 3 pm, before vanishing.