Black Monday on the BAWSAQ: Lifeinvader Spy Scandal Sets Off a Market Bloodbath

It started with one man's love life. It ended with traders crying on the floor of the BAWSAQ, a crypto coin worth almost nothing and the worst day for San Andreas stocks in living memory.

Lifeinvader shares fell 26 percent on Monday after the company's board said it was investigating chief executive Tanner Voss's relationship with a woman it believes worked for a foreign intelligence service. The stock (LFI) closed at $60.84, down from $82.35 on Friday. Then the panic spread to everything else.

Voss took over Lifeinvader after founder Jay Norris was killed when a prototype phone exploded during a live product launch. The board said at the time that it wanted "someone more careful."

In a statement posted to his Lifeinvader page late Sunday, Voss said he had been in "a brief, intimate and deeply personal relationship" with Natalia Vex, a senior executive at SkyRack Cloud. They met on Invade Your Heart, Lifeinvader's own dating feature.

According to two people who have read the board's notes, Vex asked about the Lifeinvader feed algorithm on their first date, the company's data centers on the second, and on the third asked to borrow his building pass "as a keepsake." She returned it a week later, laminated.

"She only asked about the algorithm on the first date," Voss wrote, "which is normal for a first date in tech."

The board said it had "no reason to believe that user data was compromised." A spokesperson later explained that Lifeinvader "had already sold that data through the proper channels, so nothing was taken that wasn't already for sale."

The problem is SkyRack Cloud. It does not only host Lifeinvader. It runs the servers for Bleeter, Eyefind, ZiT and, according to traders, "basically everyone who didn't want to pay for their own."

At 9:41 a.m., SkyRack's website went dark and was replaced with a single line: "Under maintenance (permanently)." Within minutes, every company that rents space from SkyRack was asking the same question: what else did she get?

Nobody had an answer, so everybody sold. The trading programs that big funds use to buy and sell automatically made it worse. Many of them also run on SkyRack, and when their own servers started acting up, they did the one thing they are built to do in an emergency, which is sell everything.

"I watched a computer sell my entire retirement in four seconds," said a broker on the floor, who asked not to be named because "my wife watches Weazel."

• Lifeinvader (LFI): down 26 percent to $60.84.
• Bleeter (BLE): down 19 percent to $49.72. Its own users were bleeting about the crash on the platform as it fell.
• Eyefind (EYE): down 15 percent to $172.31. Searches for "how to sell stocks fast" reached an all-time high on Eyefind before noon.
• ZiT (ZIT): down 9 percent. Wiwang (WIW): down 6 percent.
• Fruit Computers (FRT): down 3 percent to $364.17. A spokesperson said Fruit customers "were not affected, because they have already given us everything."

The fear did not stay in tech. Hijak picked the worst day of the year to report earnings and fell 52 percent in five minutes. Radio Los Santos missed a debt payment and said bankruptcy was "under consideration." A wildfire in Raton Canyon sent insurers lower. In crypto, BitGoon lost 83 percent in five minutes when its developers emptied the trading pool and, according to traders, boarded a boat for Cayo Perico. EpsilonCoin fell a third after one anonymous wallet dumped $120 million of it at once.

By the closing bell, 71 of the 101 companies on the BAWSAQ were down.

The only big winner was Whizz Wireless, which rose 61 percent. Its servers are in a basement in Del Perro, not at SkyRack. "We were too cheap to move to the cloud," a Whizz spokesperson said. "Today, that's a strategy."

By early afternoon, exchange staff had turned off the giant ticker board over the trading floor "so people would stop staring at it." One trader was helped out of the building by paramedics after fainting during the Hijak announcement. Others sat on the floor in groups, scrolling Lifeinvader on their phones to see what Voss would say next.

Voss posted a selfie at 2:15 p.m. with the caption "Rough day. Stay positive." It got 40,000 likes and wiped another 2 percent off his own stock.

Downloads of Invade Your Heart rose 400 percent on Monday, the only number at Lifeinvader that went up.

Voss will stay on as chief executive while the investigation runs. Three committee chairs in the State Assembly want him at a closed-door briefing next week. His office said he would attend "as long as it isn't on a Tuesday," when he records his weekly livestream.

Analysts are split on how long the damage will last. "The investigation doesn't change this quarter's numbers," said a strategist at Maze Bank Securities, which kept its "buy" rating on Lifeinvader. "It changes every quarter after that."

Outside the exchange, a man in a Lifeinvader hoodie told Weazel News he had spent his rent money buying more shares at the bottom. "Tanner Voss has survived worse," he said. Asked what, he said: "I'm sure there's something."

SkyRack Cloud did not respond to emails. Natalia Vex's Invade Your Heart profile now says "Moved abroad."