The last thing the project manager from Odul International said before he vanished from my screen was, "Alex, for the love of God, are you sure this is non-disruptive?"
And then, silence.
Not just the silence of a dropped Microsoft Teams call. This was a deeper, more profound silence: the gentle humming symphony of my home office, the reassuring whir of the fans in my server rack, the quiet electronic purr of the enterprise-grade switch, the almost imperceptible buzz of data flowing at a glorious 1 gigabit per secondโall of it just stopped.
My three 4K monitors, which a moment ago had been displaying a cascading waterfall of migration script data, a live network topology map, and the panicked face of the PM, now showed a single hateful image: a tiny cartoon dinosaur, the icon for no internet.
I stared at it. The dinosaur stared back, its pixelated eyes filled with a placid, mocking ignorance. It had no idea of the chaos it represented. It had no idea that it was currently costing Odul International approximately $50,000 a minute.
"No," I said to the empty room. "No, this isn't happening."
My fingers flew across the keyboard, muscle memory taking over.
ping 8.8.8.8
Request timed out.
ping 1.1.1.1
Request timed out.
I tried to ping my own router. Nothing. I couldn't even reach the device ten feet away from me. This wasn't a DNS issue. This wasn't a provider outage in some distant data center. This was a hard-down event. The signal was gone. The light had gone out of my life.
I swiveled in my Herman Miller chair and looked at Betsy, my beautiful, ridiculously overpowered UniFi Dream Machine Pro. Her little touchscreen display, usually a calming blue, was now a screaming blood red. WAN disconnected, it accused. The main fiber optic link light on the switch above her was darkโutterly, terrifyingly dark.