Searching for Zen when the internet falls apart
Staying calm is the first thing you’re taught in first-aid training.
But Friday’s wideranging internet attack showed me anxiety isn’t far off when it comes to losing access to the digital world, even momentarily.
We tend to dismiss our technology and devices as meaningless, distracting accessories of our modern lives.
But so much of what we do now, we do online. Work, socializing, shopping, education and entertainment. Even a minor inconvenience can suddenly become an evolving digital crisis.
And when the infrastructure falters — or in this case, is knocked offline by an apparent dark actor, as it was Friday — it can upend our sense that all is right in the world.
The internet attacks started to do that to me.
It started simply enough. When I tried to tweet Friday morning, I found I couldn’t. I didn’t think much of it. In its short history, Twitter has often been down.
Poor Twitter, I thought absent-mindedly. I tried Tweetdeck, a Twitter application for looking at the social media site on a dashboard. Couldn’t go there, either.
Never mind. My tweet could wait until the internet service booted back up again.
I checked Google News and discovered this wasn’t just a Twitter issue. Attacks on internet sites were coming in waves. CNN and Netflix were hit.
Spotify reported its problem but did so on Twitter — so who saw it?
All this was interesting to me but not a reason to panic, even after hearing that retail giant Amazon was affected, too.
In the not-too-distant past, I would have used the digital breakdown as an opportunity to leave my desk for a cup of tea. Instead, I thought I’d send a nephew some money for his 15th birthday via PayPal.
But PayPal was down. Deep breath. PayPal?
The New York Times was gone. The Guardian? Not around. Had the world ended and no one managed to tell me?
In fact, if you were on Face-
book, it was easy to be oblivious. Facebook was a sunny, chatty island unaware that its digital cousins were being silenced.
For a few short hours, I felt a tension rising as I thought about the commerce and critical work not being done because of the attack.
Among the sites reportedly knocked out of commission: Yelp, Ancestry.com, Pinterest, NFL.com, Quora, Zillow, Walgreens and Overstock. That means people engaged in a wide range of activities — looking up a restaurant review, posting a photo, checking out a home, shopping online or researching their family tree — couldn’t do it for awhile.
Would it all be fixed and forgotten soon, a blip? Or would it grow like an earthquake’s initial shaking into something bigger?
The gaping vulnerability of my communication systems hit me. I have a ridiculous number of ways of contacting friends and family — Google Hangouts, email, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Apple FaceTime, texting, Skype, WhatsApp. They are all great, but all rely on the online infrastructure always working.
By early afternoon Friday, the attacks had subsided. There were ominous reports that this was all practice by some nefarious forces for some future strike.
This was a drill for me, too. I rely on technology working. But maybe I rely on it a bit too much for my sense of well-being.
This was a drill for me, too. I’ll work on being more Zen. Next time, I’ll get that cup of tea.