Erin dances after "callin' Oates" on air

The CNN bosses said no, don't dial in to that new phone service–described as an "emergency Hall and Oates hotline"–that immediately connects you to four songs by Hall and Oates. But Erin Burnett went rogue. She dialed the number and hit "4" for "Private Eyes."

The just-launched phone number, Twitter account and website has accumulated–in just over three days–more than 325,000 340,000 calls.

How'd the idea get started–and how'd it go viral so fast? Callin' Oates co-founder Reid Butler told OutFront digital producer Mark Joyella it was born from a "new guy on the job" assignment:

The impetus for Callin Oates was that my new employer, Twilio has every new employee make an app using their developer tools," said Michael Selvidge, Sr Mgr Corporate Communications at Twilio. "I wanted to do something fun for my app, and this seemed pretty fun." Based on that, Michael (@selviano) got together over the weekend with his long time high school friend Reid butler (@rbutlersf) and began playing with the developer tools and documentation. After a few quick proof-of-concepts, the two launched Callin’ Oates on Monday 12/19. Once the service was active, @callinoates was created to spread the word around the web. Early Monday morning, Jenna Wortham from the NY Times retweeted one of the original Callin’ Oates tweets and it began to explode from there. Later that night, Reid expanded the service by creating www.callinoates.com to further raise awareness and to enable people to call into the hotline from the web via the Twilio platform. Since launching on Monday, Callin Oates has successfully handled over 340K calls.