Spygate

Spygate, also known as Shorewell-Coriagate outside Mahuset, is the name given to a short period of time in which diplomatic relations between the Confederation of Mahuset and the Abeldane Empire froze, following Emiel Sebastiaan Hardy's ban from Abel to Dabel, the national Abeldane Skype chat room, on false grounds of espionage for the Shorewellese Empire.

Etymology
The term Spygate is derived from the Watergate scandal of the United States in the early 1970s, which resulted in the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. The scandal was dubbed 'Watergate' by the press, after the Watergate complex in which many of the scandal's important events occurred. The suffix -gate is used to embellish a noun or name to suggest the existence of a far-reaching scandal, particularly in politics and government. As a CBC News Online column noted in 2001, the term may "suggest unethical behaviour and a cover-up".

The same usage has spread into micronationalism, and more specifically, in the Microwiki community in 2009. The adoption of -gate was first promoted with the Eurogate, a controversy surrounding the political system of the Empire of New Europe in June 2009. Subsequently, other names using the same suffix were coined, including Observergate, a journalism scandal involving the St.Charlian Observer that erupted in September 2009.