Rewind to 25–30 September 2006, when Facebook opened the gates, Five became four and Jackass once again tested the limits of human anatomy.

📱 Facebook lets everybody in
Got an email address? Congratulations, you can now join Facebook. Just weeks after freaking everyone out with the new News Feed, the former college-only network opens to the general public. Pokes, Walls, relationship-status drama and regrettable photo tags are coming for us all.

🏟️ The Saints come home
Thirteen months after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Saints return to the Superdome. U2 and Green Day perform, 70,000 fans pack the stadium and Steve Gleason's blocked punt helps turn a football game into an unforgettable moment for New Orleans.

🤕 Jackass goes bigger, grosser and considerably less insurable
Jackass Number Two hits cinemas with bulls, snakes, rockets, leeches and Steve-O literally dangling himself as shark bait. Somehow, this was a major studio film.

🦸 Save the cheerleader, save the world
Heroes arrives on NBC and suddenly we're all extremely invested in ordinary people discovering superpowers, Hiro Nakamura yelling "Yatta!" and figuring out exactly what the hell is going on with that cheerleader.

👓 Apparently this is “ugly”
Ugly Betty premieres, introducing America Ferrera as Betty Suarez — a smart, ambitious outsider entering the brutal world of fashion armed with braces, glasses and the apparently unforgivable crime of wearing colourful clothes.

5️⃣ Five are back! All four of them!
Five announce their reunion without Sean Conlon and offer the only explanation necessary: “Five's a brand not a number.” Honestly, no notes.

🤓 White & Nerdy takes over
Weird Al goes Straight Outta Lynwood, turns Chamillionaire's “Ridin'” into “White & Nerdy” and scores the biggest hit of his career — helped by the rapidly growing power of internet video.

📖 Everyone loves a secret society
Brad Meltzer's The Book of Fate brings us assassination attempts, Freemasons, Thomas Jefferson codes and shadowy Washington conspiracies. Because if the mid-2000s taught us anything, it's that every historical building was probably hiding a clue.

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Rewind to 18–24 September 2006, when your car had an ashtray, your phone definitely wasn't connected to it and turning on the interior light was, according to every dad, a jailable offence.

🚗 Booster seats, but make it generational — New child-restraint laws hit Britain, requiring kids to use a booster until age 12 or 135cm. We use it as an excuse to remember the family cars of our childhood: cigarette smoke, manual windows, street directories, station-wagon boot seating and the parental arm across your chest as an emergency restraint.

🚀 Hammond's 300mph horror crash — A Top Gear stunt turns terrifying when Richard Hammond crashes the jet-powered Vampire at nearly 300mph, suffering a serious brain injury in the show's most infamous accident.

🎮 Australia gets Good Game — Junglist and Kapowski plonk themselves on an old ABC couch and launch a show dedicated entirely to video games. What starts on ABC2 becomes a cult institution, spawns Spawn Point and proves gamers might actually watch television when television bothers talking to them.

👖 Chingy's checking out dem jeans — Hoodstar arrives with Pullin' Me Back, Dem Jeans and Chingy's continuing commitment to rhymes that sound suspiciously nursery-adjacent. Naturally, Sing a Song of Sixpence is called in for testing.

🕺 Scissor Sisters don't wanna dance — Elton John plays piano, Jake Shears brings the falsetto and I Don't Feel Like Dancin’ becomes an enormous dancefloor hit despite being explicitly about wanting absolutely no part of the dancefloor.

🏈 The Rock gets serious — Before he was Dwayne Johnson: Global Movie Franchise, The Rock coaches juvenile offenders through American football in Gridiron Gang, while Monster House reminds children that sometimes their irrational fear of the creepy neighbour's house is entirely justified.

📚 Hot mic, cold reception — Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine sends America's favourite breakfast-TV host into crisis after one spectacularly ill-timed hot-mic moment — while Goodreads readers respond with the devastating literary equivalent of a shrug: three stars.

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Rewind to 10–16 September 2006, when Pluto's replacement got a name that perfectly matched the chaos, Michael Schumacher shocked Formula One, Dog the Bounty Hunter found himself on the wrong side of the law and Justin Timberlake proved sexy was, in fact, making a comeback.

🪐 Meet Eris... the planet that wasn't. The object that helped get Pluto kicked out of the planetary club was officially named Eris, the Greek goddess of discord. Fitting, considering astronomers are still arguing about Pluto two decades later. Oh, and it was almost called Xena after the warrior princess. Science really missed an opportunity there.

🏎️ Schumacher says goodbye... sort of. Fresh off a win at Monza, Michael Schumacher announced he'd retire at the end of the season while still chasing an eighth world championship. It felt like the end of an era... until he surprised everyone by coming back a few years later.

🤠 Dog gets collared. Reality TV's most famous bounty hunter, Dog Chapman, was arrested over his role in capturing convicted rapist Andrew Luster in Mexico years earlier. It's one of those wonderfully bizarre headlines where the guy whose whole job is arresting people suddenly needed someone to post his own bail.

🎤 Timberlake brings sexy back. Justin Timberlake dropped FutureSex/LoveSounds, the album that transformed him from former boyband heartthrob into one of pop's biggest solo stars. "SexyBack", "My Love", "What Goes Around... Comes Around"—it wasn't just an album, it was a cultural reset powered by Timbaland beats.

🧙 Pretty boys with powers. The Covenant hit cinemas with magic, muscles and enough Abercrombie energy to power an entire shopping centre. Critics rolled their eyes, but hindsight has been much kinder to this gloriously over-the-top supernatural teen flick packed with future stars.

💔 Operation: John Tucker Must Die. Before revenge plots unfolded via Instagram Stories, four girls teamed up to destroy the school's biggest heartbreaker the old-fashioned way. Flip phones, pop-punk and deliciously petty payback—it doesn't get much more 2006 than that.

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Rewind to 3–9 September 2006, when Australia lost two legends, Paris Hilton discovered being rich couldn't get you out of probation and Sean Paul had every dancefloor speaking fluent gibberish.

🐊 Crikey... Australia says goodbye to Steve Irwin
The world lost its favourite wildlife warrior in a tragedy that still feels impossible to believe. After a lifetime wrestling crocodiles, dodging venomous snakes and getting far too close to just about every dangerous animal on Earth, Steve's story ended in the most unexpected way imaginable. Twenty years on, his conservation legacy is bigger than ever.

🏁 The King of the Mountain takes his final lap
Just four days later, Australia was in mourning again as Peter Brock was killed during the Targa West rally. The man who conquered Bathurst nine times didn't die on the mountain that made him famous, making the loss feel even more surreal. It was a heartbreaking week that marked the end of two uniquely Australian icons.

👑 Paris checks in... then checks into jail
A Hollywood DUI arrest was only the beginning. Paris Hilton's legal troubles would snowball into one of the biggest celebrity media circuses of the 2000s, complete with "Free Paris" T-shirts, helicopter chases and enough tabloid coverage to make today's gossip cycle look restrained.

🎤 Sean Paul still had us all mumbling along
Give It Up To Me landed with Keyshia Cole in tow, proving once again that nobody needed to understand Sean Paul's lyrics to know every single word. Peak 2000s dancehall, peak club anthem and another reminder that he quietly owned the decade.

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Rewind to 27 August–2 September 2006, when one of the biggest gaming platforms in history quietly launched with almost nobody noticing, Jessica Simpson was trying to move on from America's favourite celebrity divorce and a pair of stolen masterpieces finally reappeared after two years on the run.

🎮 From blocky beginnings to global obsession
Roblox officially launched this week with a handful of simple games and barely any fanfare. Twenty years later, it's home to millions of player-created worlds, virtual concerts and enough Robux to make parents everywhere sigh.

🖼️ The Scream returns
Two years after masked gunmen stormed a museum in broad daylight, Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna were finally recovered. The only catch? Police have never revealed exactly how they got them back, making one of the world's most famous art heists even more mysterious.

💔 Jessica's public affair
Fresh off her headline-making split from Nick Lachey, Jessica Simpson released A Public Affair. We rewind to one of the biggest celebrity breakups of the 2000s, revisit the rumours, the tabloid frenzy and ask whether reality TV helped make—or break—their marriage.

✈️ The runway mistake that changed aviation
Comair Flight 5191 crashed after taking off from the wrong runway in one of the deadliest aviation accidents of the decade. The tragedy led to major changes in cockpit procedures and airport safety that are still in place today.

🎤 The VMAs lose their edge
Panic! at the Disco shocked the music world by beating Madonna, Shakira and Christina Aguilera for Video of the Year, while critics declared the once-outrageous MTV VMAs had become... a bit boring. After years of headline-grabbing scandals, the biggest story was that there wasn't one.

🧦 Innovation or just... thermal underwear?
Our Innovations Catalogue heads to Damart, where the Fancy Knit Spencer promised "comfort and complete freedom" and buying the matching thermal pants could even score you a discount. Peak catalogue glamour... if your idea of glamour involved long johns.

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Rewind to 20–26 August 2006, when one of Europe's biggest missing person mysteries finally came to an end, the internet started rewriting Hollywood scripts and Justin Timberlake confidently declared he was bringing sexy back.

🏃 The escape that stunned the world
After eight years in captivity, Natascha Kampusch escaped her abductor and brought one of Europe's most extraordinary missing person cases to an end. We unpack how she survived, why the story captivated the world and the remarkable way she later reclaimed part of her own story.

🐍 The internet's first blockbuster?
Snakes on a Plane slithered into cinemas after online hype reached fever pitch. Fans memed it, the studio leaned into the chaos and Samuel L. Jackson delivered one of the most quotable movie lines of the 2000s. Was this the first film the internet actually changed?

🎤 Sexy's apparently back
Justin Timberlake ditched the boy-band image for SexyBack, a futuristic banger that divided critics, topped charts and helped redefine pop music.

🌉 Fergie starts a bridge war
London Bridge launched Fergie's solo career, topped the charts and somehow convinced an entire generation that Tower Bridge was actually London Bridge. We revisit one of pop music's greatest geographical mix-ups and decode what the song was really about.

🤘 Iron Maiden's boldest tour gamble
Most bands save the new songs for later. Iron Maiden did the opposite, playing their entire new album before touching the classics. Fans weren't exactly thrilled, but nearly 20 years on, was Bruce Dickinson and the band right all along?

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Rewind to 13–19 August 2006, when internet petitions were becoming a thing, every celebrity seemed to have a side hustle and the Innovations catalogue was convinced you could get ripped without leaving the lounge room.

🎤 Beyoncé vs the internet
Déjà Vu hit the charts but it was the music video that stole the headlines. Thousands of fans signed an online petition demanding Beyoncé remake it, complete with less frantic editing and a different director. Imagine trying to crowdsource creative feedback for Beyoncé in 2006.

👑 The JonBenét case takes another twist
A decade after the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the world thought the mystery had finally been solved when John Mark Karr was arrested in Thailand. The dramatic confession made global headlines, only for DNA evidence to unravel the case just days later.

💿 Paris Hilton proves the haters wrong
Everyone expected a celebrity vanity album. Instead, Stars Are Blind became one of the catchiest songs of the decade and, twenty years later, we're all finally admitting we secretly loved it.

📰 Reporting from the world's most dangerous places
Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig were kidnapped while reporting in Gaza, reminding the world of the extraordinary risks journalists take to bring us stories from conflict zones.

🏃 Fitness, but make it foldable
The Innovations catalogue promised the Brilliant Air Walker would tone your entire body, protect your joints and then neatly fold into a cupboard. Peak 2000s logic: if the exercise machine stored away easily, you could pretend it wasn't becoming an expensive clothes rack.

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Rewind to 6–12 August 2006, when airport security changed forever, Christina Aguilera went full Old Hollywood, Tiger Woods was collecting milestones like Pokémon cards and your AOL search history suddenly wasn't as private as you thought.

✈️ The plot that changed flying forever
A foiled terror plot targeting multiple transatlantic flights threw airports into chaos and introduced the liquid restrictions we're still dealing with today. If you've ever argued with security over a bottle of sunscreen, this is where it all began.

🐯 Tiger hits 50
Tiger Woods claimed his 50th PGA Tour victory while sitting firmly at the top of the sporting world. Before the scandals, before the comeback, this was Peak Tiger – so dominant that rappers were using his name as shorthand for being the best.

🔍 Oops... there goes your privacy
AOL accidentally released 20 million search queries from 500,000 users, proving that "anonymous" data wasn't nearly as anonymous as everyone thought. It became one of the internet's biggest privacy wake-up calls and still feels eerily relevant.

💋 Xtina goes Back to Basics
Christina Aguilera swapped the Dirrty era for jazz, soul and vintage Hollywood glamour. The result? One of the biggest pop reinventions of the decade, complete with Ain't No Other Man, Hurt and Candyman.

🐾 Blue finds one last clue
After ten years of Handy Dandy Notebooks and Thinking Chairs, Blue's Clues aired its final original episode. We look back at the show that quietly revolutionised children's TV and the emotional Steve Burns comeback that made millennials unexpectedly cry years later.

🏁 Shake and bake!
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby raced into cinemas, proving NASCAR, Will Ferrell and absurd one-liners were a winning combination. If you ain't first... well, you know the rest.

🎶 Don't loosen up those buttons just yet
The Pussycat Dolls' Buttons was climbing the charts, complete with the Snoop Dogg remix that became the version everyone remembers. It's pure mid-2000s pop perfection.

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