Drop off the Face (Book) of the cosmos

The end of the world as we know it was very nigh on Monday evening. In the words of Facebook, 'Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt.' In non-nerd network-talk: Facebook, and its other platforms WhatsApp and Instagram, went kaput. Why? Because the Border Gateway Protocol that holds ever-changing internet routes to their destination source (Facebook's playgrounds) together stopped working. Basically, the bulk of social media dropped off the face(book) of the universe.

After the confusion, frustration and desperation - the three stages of a social media addict's detox process - a calm descended. Many humans recalled a life before the internet - yes, even those living today had no internet once - comprising non-phone conversation, using truly wireless devices called books and magazines, and inhabiting an e-less world. True, Google and Netflix et al were humming, and Twitter played messenger to the bad news. But it got us thinking - about a life without the internet. We gazed into the abyss and 'No Internet' with the dino sign gazed back at us.