Somewhere outside the desolate, storm-covered wasteland that was Australia, an exponentially number of requests began to hit the DNS servers, as, suddenly, Australia began to generate a web presence which... well, was still much, much reduced over what it had been in 2000, when civilisation there had died, but was a lot larger than it should have been.
Sysadmins all across the world had already begun to talk of "The Austalian Haunting". On black IRC channels and hidden, user-locked forums, a mythology had begun to accumulate, of the ghosts of dead Australians, still browsing the internet from beyond the grave.
The secondary opinion, however, from those who didn't believe in ghosts, was that it was all NERV's fault. Mind you, the sort of people who blamed NERV for the Australian Haunting also blamed them for the internet phenomenon of Ree-Rolling, the practice of linking people to videos of... unorthodox... uses for vegetables, which just went to show how incurably paranoid they were.