The Disappearance of the Internet

On a bright morning, Ryder stretched and yawed his way out of bed, still brimming with exhilaration from winning his swimming competition the day before. Grabbing his phone, he was eager to text his buddies about the win. But every time he tried to log in to WeChat, a warning message appeared that the internet was down. Ryder frowned as he grabbed his other gadgets, a laptop this time, and, although full bars displayed on both, nothing connected.

Ryder’s heart sank with anxiety. He dashed to his mom’s room, praying to find a signal on her phone. There wasn’t one. She looked just as bewildered. Sprinting down to check on the Wi-Fi router, there were no blinking red lights indicating anything was wrong; the connection just died. Not that his calling anyone would have worked anyway; he couldn’t message his friends regarding his homework, log into school, or even catch up on the news. The silence was deafening, with the internet simply gone. No warning, no reason among friends. Their house couldn’t have been the only one affected; it had to be something bigger, catastrophic, spreading far beyond the walls they knew.

He found his father downstairs, staring at a laptop on the kitchen table. “Dad, it’s the whole internet! My phone, Mom’s phone, the router is fine, but nothing is connecting!”

His dad looked nothing short of shocked. “I know, son. I have tried many news sites, the bank, and even some simple weather pages that used to load in seconds. None of the web pages are loading. It could mean that this is an outage of Wi-Fi services in the city or on the globe.”

Ryder’s mother stumbled back into the living room, holding an old rusty radio. “I finally found something that can connect us to the outside world,” giving a surprised voice. “This is a government emergency broadcast. They are calling it a network disconnection due to power station failures that are global.”

Ryder felt sick with disappointment and panic. No online class, no chatting with friends, no entertainment. He realized how society depended on the invisible structure of technology, the internet, and communication, but all of it was gone.