Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: What do you do when the Internet goes down?
10 points by bluedays on Aug 12, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


We had a fiber optic cut a few years back that was weird in that way. No cell data, no cable internet. I made plans to leave town so I could do my work, and it would have been a 30 minute drive to get to the nearest place that had internet.

Nobody in the neighborhood knew what was going on at first. Eventually I turned on the FM radio and within a couple minutes they had an update as to what was going on and when a fix was expected. It was some hours before service was restored.

Overall the feeling sucked because it hit in the middle of a busy day and there was this question of A) how long will this take, given that I'm working on something, and B) how big a deal is it that I can't get any notifications from servers or other services?

Since that time I picked up a bank of scanner radios and put some content I enjoy on the LAN. So it's less of an issue, and things feel way more plugged in when problems occur. But it's still annoying to think it might happen again for any number of reasons.


I visit https://hackernews.onlineornot.com to see if it's actually down, if it is, I swap to a 4G hotspot and keep on coding.


Refresh. Frown. Close browser. Restart browser. Frown. Open command line. Ping. Frown. Switch from LAN (power line to router) to WiFI. Frown. Reboot router. Frown. Switch to mobile hotspot. Carry on.


I have a very large number of eBooks on my computer that I can read.


Progress unfinished thoughts and make new ones.


Play PS4 or some music in Bitwig.


offline hours are considerably better suited to programming for me :-D


Nap.


Reconnect.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: