When Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old gap-year student, landed a coveted blogging spot on which to chronicle his two-month backpacking adventure around India and Thailand, he could have never predicted how his moment of triumph would backfire so spectacularly.

But within 24 hours of his first posting on the theguardian.com travel pages, the teenager was swamped by a tidal wave of internet hate mail as he became a victim of the phenomenon of 'going viral'. As the north London teenager was touching down in Mumbai, hundreds of comments - many vitriolic - were appearing not only on his blog, but on scores of message boards and social networking forums, including Facebook and high-profile gossip sites such as Holy Moly.

The astonishing reaction was provoked when surfers spotted that he had the same surname as Paul Gogarty, a travel writer who occasionally contributes to the Guardian. Readers presumed he was a privileged public school boy whose father had secured him the blog spot and whose gap-year travels were being funded by the newspaper.

The resulting 'cyber-bullying' has now forced Max, an occasional scriptwriter for the E4 teenage drama series Skins, to ditch his weekly blog while he and his family cope with the consequences of global internet exposure.

Max, who introduced himself as living 'on top of a hill in north London...spending any sort of money I earn on food and skinny jeans', was last night alone in India at the beginning of his trip, while his father accused his detractors of class hatred and envy. 'It's the conformity of the comments, the cruelty, the smug self-righteousness and envy. It's all so bitter and full of bile. The exposure is terrifying,' said Gogarty Snr. 'He's out in India on his own. We were all feeling upset at him going away anyway. But this...this tsunami of hate. We just cannot believe it. Max is a talented and hard-working boy. He is what he is - a middle-class kid who goes to a comprehensive and managed to get four As and is supporting himself by working in a cafe.'

He said his son was invited on to a young writers' group at London's Royal Court Theatre, and from there he began writing for Skins before being offered the travel blog. 'There is no nepotism. I hardly ever write for the Guardian,' said Gogarty. 'He is not an attention seeker. He is just bright and 19 and middle-class - and that's a crime in Britain.'

Max's debut blog on Thursday, an innocuous, possibly gauche, account of his preparations for his trip, attracted so many comments that other websites soon seized on the debate. He now appears on Wikipedia under the section on 'nepotism', alongside Kim Jong-il of North Korea and George W Bush.

Eventually Gogarty felt compelled to weigh in himself, posting: 'Max won't be writing any more blogs, I thought I'd bring all those heroic internet warriors the good news. Max's trip (which he paid for himself I'm afraid - sorry) has got off to the worst possible start and he's feeling pretty grim You may like or dislike the blog, but the cruelty is shocking, if quintessentially British.'

The blog attracted almost 500 comments on theguardian.com before it was closed. The director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the mood had changed after the intervention of Max's father and the comments had become more critical of the website and its editors' decision to commission and publish the blog: 'They were much happier to give us a kicking instead of him.'

She added that 'going viral' happened reasonably regularly, but was unpredictable. Other recent examples included the DJ Mike Read's blog supporting Boris Johnson for mayor of London, which had a record 1,132 comments. An intimate email, allegedly sent by Claire Swire to her boyfriend Bradley Chait in which she is said to have referred to a sex act, also went round the world. Of the comments on Max's blog, Bell said: 'A lot of this is quite funny, but not for Max. As publisher, we have a duty of care to him.'

In her own online blog, Bell wrote: 'We're used to it, but it is still an absurdly awful experience for the individual on the end of the monstering, particularly if you are a relative novice.' She added: 'Perhaps an open blog post was not the best place to publish it.'

Some contributors were uneasy over the tone of many comments. One wrote: 'The amount of hate, envy and hypocrisy that's been on display here is shocking.'

But others compared Max to Nathan Barley, a loathsome fictional twentysomething London media type in the Channel 4 sitcom of the same name. One asked, 'Whose son is Max then?', while another predicted, 'Oh, Christ. This guy's going to get an absolute hammering.' Yet another added: 'Don't show Derek Conway this - he'll be most upset.'

Still others urged him to continue the blog and answer the critics, but his father said: 'We just want him to be left alone. It's scary and the exposure is so horrible. He's a strong kid and I think he is moving on. Max himself made the decision to pull it and I think it is a mature decision.

'People have said "stay and fight". But there is no way - whatever he writes next week, it would be pilloried. It's a no-win situation. He has seen some of the blog. He has said to me that he doesn't like the media world now. He doesn't want to go into it any more.'