• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 11, 2016

USA Network producers unexpectedly ran this week's season 2 premier of "Mr. Robot," which seems to be somewhat of a takeoff of real hackers and a variety of actual hacks.

The network held a real-life Q&A broadcast on Facebook Live, but about 20 minutes into the programming, the fictitious hacker group FSociety interrupted with a message "leaking" the show's season premier scheduled to air Wednesday on television.

Producers made the stream available on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube, but after the episode aired, all evidence disappeared from the social sites, sending fans on a wild goose chase around the Internet searching for evidence the stream existed.

The empty spaces that once ran the content were left with an error message.

While it's too early to tell the success of the PR stunt, google.com searches show the leaked first episode of season 2 from the award winning TV hit "Mr. Robot" produced more than 242,000 pieces of content within 12 hours after the season 2 premier airing online.

The initial tweet had about 900 retweets and 1,400 likes, reports Esquire. 

The show, created by Sam Esmail, averaged roughly 1.4 million viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 per episode in 2015, and 2.8 million viewers across all platforms and in delayed viewing, says Deadline Hollywood, citing the network's numbers.

The show's special, which creates a likeness between the show's FSociety and the real-life Anonymous and the Guy Fawkes mask people started to wear, aired during the weekend on broadcast television. It pulled in comments from experts like Lance James, chief scientist at Flashpoint, as well as Jeff Moss, "Dark Tangetnt," hacker and founder of Defcon Security conferences.