Thorne started the 27bslash6 website as a vehicle purely to annoy, as a support to trolling people on Facebook and other social networking sites under the pseudonym Tabitha Gnillort, the girl on the entry page of the site. This behavior developed a small following and the content developed from that. The name of his website (27bslash6) is a reference to the fact that George Orwell lived in Apartment 27b on level 6 while writing the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The phrase "27B stroke 6" is also used by Terry Gilliam in his movie Brazil. Thorne states that he was unable to secure the word stroke and instead chose the word slash. The website went from receiving a hundred hits a week from a small and consistent group of people to gaining a larger mainstream audience — a few thousand hits a day — when the article I Wish I Had a Monkey was listed on the Bored At Work website. Following the spider drawing page being posted on Digg, the 27bslash6 server crashed after taking over half a million hits in a 24-hour period before being moved to a dedicated server. The second server crashed following Thorne's next article, "Party in Apartment 3," in which Thorne repeatedly RSVPs for a party he has not been invited to, before the site was moved to a third server in the US and has since continued to receive a large volume of traffic.

The spider drawing itself became so popular that it was auctioned on eBay, where a user posted a high bid of US$10,000 but subsequently said he had no intention of paying. When asked how he felt about the refusal of the buyer to pay, Thorne stated, "The internet is a playground and I would not have it any other way." The spider email has also been featured on several television and radio programs including BBC's Have I Got News for You in the UK and the Late Show with David Letterman in the US. The news article regarding the spider email was voted most popular news story of 2008 in Australia, where it received five times the views of any other article for the year.

Thorne has also had international success with several of his other articles from the 27bslash6 website such as "Strata Agreement" and "Party in Apartment 3," which became so popular that it was read out during a prime time broadcast on BBC Radio in the United Kingdom and reprinted in more than 300 newspapers worldwide. Thorne's article regarding a former client contacting him for pro-bono work titled "Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free." (November 2009) became such a viral hit due to being passed on by email and social networking sites that it has been described as one of the most passed on viral emails of all time and has been mentioned on twitter by many celebrities, read out on radio throughout the UK, US and Germany, and featured on The Ellen Degeneres Show, Australia's The 7PM Project and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

On , the website was taken offline for several hours and any attempt to access it was directed to a page stating the account had been suspended. Thorne had published an article a few days earlier detailing an email exchange with an officer from South Australia's E-Crime unit regarding an earlier article in which Thorne wrote of purchasing drugs to sell at a profit. Following the correspondence with the officer, Thorne replaced the word drugs with cats in the original article to avoid the threat of having the website shut down.

Thorne's first book, a collection of articles from the website called The Internet is a Playground, sold almost 8,000 copies in its first month of release and is now in its third revision.

On 25 April 2010, David Thorne created a Facebook event entitled "Kate's Birthday Party". The hoax event, a birthday party for an Adelaide woman named Kate, was supposedly accidentally left open to public security settings, allowing anyone to RSVP. Following several links being posted on the image board 4chan and Reddit, the event amassed more than 60,000 attendees. Several blogs picked up on the event as an example of security flaws within Facebook. Thorne created an "I Attended Kate's Party" T-Shirt and began selling it on his online store, whilst numerous Facebook groups were spawned in reference to the event. The event, originally scheduled for Saturday, 1 May at 8:00 pm, was eventually taken down by Facebook.