While the masses are still well entrenched in the Phil Roberston Saga, the techies and PR folks moved onto a new crisis dujour on Friday.

If you don’t know the name Justine Sacco, she’ll probably make the late night comedy circuit come Monday evening. Sacco, by all accounts, before boarding a flight to Cape Town Africa yesterday, was a PR Professional. She seemed to be well liked and her career included working for World Wrestling Entertainment and then serving as the Corporate Communications Director for IAC the web holding company that owns the likes of match.com, Vimeo and other very well known brands.

But to catch you up, here are 5 things about Justine Sacco

1. While boarding a flight from Heathrow to Cape Town on Friday Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I Don’t get AIDS. Just Kidding. I’m White”.  Of course the tweet itself is vulgar, racists and horrible but at the time it was tweeted she had under 300 Twitter followers. However, she’s a PR person and many of those followers included journalists at top rated websites. Gawker’s Valleywag was the first to pick up the tweet, and put together the pieces.  Obviously the tweet was stupid. There are tens of thousands of people dying everywhere from AIDS and Africa has a large amount of people afflicted with the disease. Definitely not a joking matter.

2.What makes this out of this world stupid is that as the Director of Communications for IAC she oversees the corporate messaging for one of the biggest web companies in the world. A company that Barry Diller owns. She also lists crisis PR management in her skill sets on LinkedIn. Based on her referrals and endorsements she seemed to be good at Crisis PR and she probably is. In crisis PR it would be her job to fix crisis like this.

In addition to Vimeo, match.com and even OKcupid, IAC owns BlackPeopleMeet.com a top dating website for African Americans. When the tweet started going viral people of all races chimed in, Sacco became the punch line to many Twitter jokes and of course the meme machine went crazy. But some of the people who were outraged about her Tweet were customers of BlackPeopleMeet who were appalled that someone so high up in that company would so distastefully insult their user base.

3. Adding to the frustration of people reading the Tweet was that Sacco tweeted right before getting on a flight to Cape Town. From all accounts it seems that the flight took 11 hours from Heathrow to the Capetown airport. Believe it or not there are flights out there that don’t have wifi and it appears that Sacco’s flight was one of them.   Sacco wasn’t able to respond to the outrage, defend herself, delete the tweet or any other remedy because she couldn’t get on the internet.

That factor led to GoGo inflight internet chiming in on the matter with this tweet. While Jason Calcanis retweeted it with an “Oh Snap” in front of it, Microsoft developer evangelist, Douglas Crets, who is widely respected in the tech community, argued that the tweet was in poor taste.

But that wasn’t enough Gogo felt that Crets’ tweet validated their original message:

But by morning the inflight internet giant had backed off the position totally.

Personally I think the opportunity is there for Sacco to apologize to the world, donate to AIDS education and a cure, and then go to work for GoGo.

4. It appears that Sacco was actually going to spend Christmas with her family in Capetown. A Twitter user was at the Capetown airport and took several pictures of Sacco as she left the gate. The user also said he had spoken with her dad who basically said he was appalled at what happened. Sacco got off the plane with the father, someone who could’ve been her sister or friend and a teenage boy that was apparently her younger brother. From tweets surrounding the arrival, which warranted that hashtag #hasjustinelanded, seemed indicative that this was some kind of family trip and that the Sacco family may have originally been from Capetown.

5. Olivia Pope, well actually the woman who plays Olivia Pope, Kerry Washington, from the megahit blockbuster tv show Scandal even jumped into the foray. Many Twitter users were saying that in order for Sacco to get out of this mess she needed Olivia Pope’s expertise. Washington retweeted a tweet suggesting that Olivia Pope couldn’t even help her, and another one i

Anil Dash, the founder of Thinkup and another very active Twitter user suggested that Sacco and IAC take this opportunity to do some good. Perhaps she could do some service work in regards to AIDS and even PR work to help AIDS education. We’re not sure she’ll be able to do that with IAC, the company gave a pretty stern statement to Valleywag and had erased Sacco from their website by 8pm last night. Whatever it was this sure has been a whirlwind of a lesson in social media, virality and of course human decency.