In early 2000 I was playing a stand alone mod for Unreal Tournament 99 called Tactical Ops. UT99 provided an IRC client right in the game and people used it to coordinate matches, when somebody from nato-ladder (North American Tactical Ops Ladder) discovered that spamming a specific character to a player in private message (or even in public channel where the player was) caused the game to crash with nothing to show in the logs.
They used it intelligently during tournament, not overusing it, just making a particular player drop at the right moment and probably abused it for sometime before it became publicly known.
I don't remember if this was an issue also present in UT99 or just TO.
Yea It took some time before I had it available in the PlayStore here in Canada after the release, but the app from this article had updated their description saying they are not related to META Threads.