Internets Down? Kill Yourself.

If there is an internet outage then people try and kill themselves, and fast. No ‘world wide web’ is the fastest way to increase the suicide rate in any given city, according to some bro I met the other day anyway. He was visually frustrated, antsy and shaking like a crack addict 10 hours clean. He smelt really bad too. “Fucking Telstra“ he said, looking around like someone was following his skinny white frame. “I’ve got a tonne of important emails to check and the internet has been down for the past two hours!” he blurted out, continuing on with a conversation I was clearly trying to avoid. “Its beyond me how they can keep charging my account, while they leave me out in the fucking cold – no net at all!” he continued, sweat now building on his forehead. I was unfamiliar with the internet outages at the time, but when I escaped the freak and got home, I had a desire to find out just what amount of downtime had cause this guy to go into physical withdrawal. Turns out (after a bit of research), Telstra experienced widespread outages, which essentially affected 90% of their mobile and broadband clients. These outages lasted between one and two hours depending on location. Given it was the first outage Telstra had experienced in over a month, the angry bro I had talked to earlier in the day had only missed out on about .001% of his monthly internet time.

I grant it’s a humbling experience having the internet ripped out of your grasp, especially when you’re in a field that relies on it to make a living. Even so, its astounding to see just how much it affects every second person. If I were to give my predictions, I’d say during the outages incidences of panic attacks rose 96%. Of those effected, 43% were probably online gamers and 22% were reliant on the internet to make a living. I’d also guess that a man in Gympie (probably a pretty accurate guess), Queensland, lay in the middle of the Bruce Highway in an attempt to commit suicide. Fortunately, no one would have been on the roads at the time, with 62% of Queenslander’s at home arguing with Telstra technical support staff in India. Aside from made up statistics, there is no factual controversy in stating that nowadays, the average friendship engages in contact more online than it does in person. Perhaps that’s why my encounter with the unhappy Telstra customer earlier in the day was so uncomfortable, and not just for him.

The benefits of the internet are undeniable, but the situation made me wonder – if the internet shut down forever, what would happen? How many people would die? How many jobs would be lost? How would the world change for the worse? How would it change for the better? I wouldn’t even know where to start, but I could ask that crazy fucker I met during the last outage if I wanted a place to start.