An Aussie IT contractor working for an ISP snapped and threatened to burn down the company's data centre and take to its manager with an axe. Bryce Quilley, 29, of Tailem Bend, admitted deleting staff emails and ruining computer servers.

Adelaide's District Court heard Quilley admit three counts of unlawful modification of computer data, one aggravated count of threatening to cause harm and one aggravated count of threatening to damage property. Michael Blake, co-founder and operations manger at NuSkope, the ISP involved, told Fairfax Media that Quilley just snapped. He said that he, Quilley and NuSkope's other co-founder all grew up together and he had known him for 30 years. One day out of the blue he demanded $10,000 or he would delete staff email accounts, Blake said.

When he was ignored he started to delete staff emails and trashed other servers so that they became unusable. Blake's other co-founder was on a phone call with Quilley for about four hours as he began doing the damage, Blake said. During the call a co-founder who was threatened with an axe whilst on the phone.

The company can't think of anything that should have triggered what Quilley did. Blake said it was totally out of the blue, although Quilley had broken up with his girlfriend around the same time which might have had something to do with it.

Apart from deleting staff emails, Quilley also trashed four online gaming servers which NuSkope hosted.