This morning, Don was talking on the phone with someone in a nearby town concerning a community project they're both working on. Without warning, the phone gave three warning beeps and died.
Our phone is an older instrument. We call it a landline (since it doesn't accept texts), though technically it's a cell phone. Sometimes the battery gets low, or sometimes it gives us connectivity issues, but 99 percent of the time it's fine.
Anyway, the dropped phone call was an annoyance but not much else ... until Don saw a notice on his computer that the internet had been disconnected.
This was weird. The phone and our internet are two entirely separate internet providers. Why would they both go down at the same time?
In less than five minutes, both forms of communication were back up. Don called his associate again, and they both agreed it was a weird glitch. "Yeah, there are all kinds of rumors that bad things are coming," the other man said.
Yeah, a weird glitch.
Even with different providers, independent services often rely on the same physical utility poles, underground conduit bundles, or regional data centers. A single accident (like a construction vehicle severing a main fiber trunk) can disable multiple networks.
ReplyDelete