 A hotline set up by the station was swamped by 2,600 calls, whilst RTBF's website crashed.Thirty minutes into the broadcast, on demand of the media minister of the French-speaking community in Belgium, , an on-screen message identified it as a fiction.The hoax was the creation of the journalist and had been prepared over a period of 2 years under the codename "BBB" for "Bye-bye Belgium".