What if the internet went down for a month?
Maps go blank and cards stop working. People find out who still owns a radio.
Day one. The cash machine is dead and the queue keeps growing.
Day 1
Phones show no signal. Card machines go dark. Within an hour every petrol station has a queue, and every shop has a handwritten sign on the door: cash only.
The strangest part is the silence. Nobody knows what is going on, because the way everyone finds out what is going on has gone.
Week 2
People adjust within days. Neighbours knock on doors again. Radios come out of cupboards, paper maps come out of glove boxes, and the local paper sells out every morning.
Money is trickier. Wages can’t be paid and bills can’t be sent, so corner shops start keeping notebooks of who owes what, the way they did fifty years ago.
A year later
Everything is back online, but some things have changed for good. Banks keep cash machines that work offline. Hospitals keep paper copies. A lot of families keep a radio in the kitchen and some cash in a drawer.
And many people kept one habit from that month: dinner with the phones in another room.
Who wins
- RadiosThe oldest gadget in the house becomes the most important one.
- Corner shops that know their customersThey can sell on trust. The big chains can’t.
- Libraries and board gamesFor one month, the most exciting places in town.
Who loses
- Anyone without cashA full bank account is no use if nobody can reach it.
- Online-only businessesA month with no sales is more than most can survive.
- Hospitals and airportsAlmost everything they do runs through a connection.
- Long-distance couplesWriting letters is romantic for about three days.
The internet is made of thousands of cables, satellites and power stations, so losing all of them at once would be rare. Losing a few for a week is far more likely, and very few households have a plan for that.
Would you cope for a month?
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