IF YOU WERE following the Sky News Breaking account on Twitter earlier today, you may have noticed a mysterious tweet.

That tweet would send the entire internet into a tailspin. Here’s how it happened.

First, there was this baffling tweet from an account with more than 900,000 followers:

What was it?

People could only speculate:

All in all it was a great day for people called Colin, who suddenly found their name the most popular word on the internet:

Graph via hashtags.org

And naturally, there was a parody account:

Other news outlets had a GREAT old gloat:

And then – finally – we learned what was going on.

First, there was this enigmatic tweet from another Sky News account:

And then, this even-more-enigmatic explanation:

So we know that if the world genuinely DOES get taken over by a fearsome superbeing named Colin, Sky News have got their tweet ready to go.

Then, after Colin was gone, there was only emptiness:

We all miss Colin. RIP Colin.

8 reasons to be excited about the new Michael J. Fox show>

What do people think about Justin Bieber playing Croke Park?>