Star Trek hero George Takei unleashed such a wave of interest after posting a link on his Facebook page – to a website which was selling a 'Takei T-shirt' – that the site's ISP assumed that the traffic was a DDoS attack and took the site down for several hours.

The Star Trek star posted a link to a gay-pride T-shirt with a Takei twist to his two million fans on the social network and the click-through rates were so high that his servers believed they were being attacked by a nefarious bot rather than customers with a genuine interest in Takei-themed T-shirts.

"Apparently, my fans here collectively can now resemble a coordinated worldwide web assault," Takei said in a Facebook post, after the site had been brought back online.