On Surviving the Great Internet Outage of 2025

 On Surviving the Great Internet Outage of 2025


I'm calling it the Great Internet Outage of 2025 at least until the next one. The going conspiracy theory is that it was somehow Musk who cut off the internet to Juneau, Alaska a few days ago to try and get more people onto Starlink. Probable? No. Would he do it though? Probable.

The exact moment I noticed my connection was down was when I spotted a notification from a Discord channel dedicated to my favorite podcast, "The Film Reroll." As the podcast uploads very irregularly, an update from that discord meant either there was a new episode, or something worth noting had happened to one of the hosts. So I clicked. The post didn't load. I checked my connection status. The internet was out. I could only watch as the YouTube video I had up playing music slowly reached the end of the buffer. Then silence.

I immediately checked my phone to see if it was just my computer, my router, or a bigger problem. Cell service was out. That changed everything. There was a much bigger problem. Juneau gets its internet from undersea cables. The cell towers have battery backups. Even in a power outage cell service still works. If nothing was coming in, then, barring a Russian warship parked in the harbor, a total outage meant there was a severed cable somewhere deep underwater. Our neighboring town of Sitka had recently lost internet through their undersea cable, and their outage lasted weeks. Just to be sure, I tried texting a family member to see if their internet was out and my text didn't go through.

I dug through my pile of old electronics to find a working radio. I considered putting fresh batteries into my old portable camping radio but chose to see if a radio that needed a wall plug would work instead. Things could always get worse and I could lose power too, so it would be better to keep spare batteries fresh as long as possible. The first radio I tried, an old alarm clock, didn't pick up any local news stations. The second radio I tried, a slightly less old alarm clock, picked up the local public radio station. They were playing their usual programming with no interruption. I had live coverage of some conflict happening in the Middle East, but not what was happening in my city. So the local news station was still getting its feed and it wasn't a global communications issue. That was all I could learn from that.

I read a book and went to bed.

The next day the radio actually had an update about the outage, saying there was a problem with the undersea cable for just one of the two major internet providers in the city and one of the phone carriers. They both happened to be the ones I used. The report finished with, "More information on our website."

Thanks. That was a real helpful place to put it.

The outage lasted two days. I spent a few hours each day out somewhere with wifi getting work done, but otherwise, I was at home alone. Turns out, you're not missing much without the internet. The few updates I did get on Facebook and other algorithmically curated feeds were mostly other people posting about their internet being out. The rest of my family got internet from the other provider, so they didn't even know mine was out. I took it as a sign of my family respecting my privacy that they hadn't called or texted in those two days only to find out that I was unreachable. I can't imagine their panic had they realized they were unable to reach me at a moment's notice. I half expected one of them to show up at my door to check that I hadn't died and then I would have had to explain that lack of internet wasn't exactly a common cause of fatality. Yet.

Eventually, the internet came back on its own. And by on its own, I mean the provider had worked hard to get things back online and more repairs were ongoing, according to their online post. But to me, it was just a moment when I started getting notifications for emails I didn't care about again.

The Discord notification I had originally missed turned out to be for a post alerting The Film Reroll Patreon supporters to some bonus content, something that wasn't relevant to me. However, The Film Reroll uploaded a new episode a few days later, their first in months. As I laughed along to their antics playing a roleplaying game, it felt like being with old friends. Or at least with familiar improv performers whose conversation had been edited down to just the witty bits. Maybe the internet has brought some good things.

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