Wi-Fi Went Down for 30 Minutes, Society Collapsed Instantly

At 3:17 PM on Tuesday, tragedy struck. A Wi-Fi outage swept across a 12-block radius in a moderately irrelevant suburb, and humanity promptly began unraveling like a middle-school group project with no adult supervision.

Within minutes, coffee shops became holding cells for the digitally displaced. Citizens roamed the streets clutching laptops like broken dreams, frantically asking strangers, “Is yours working?” No one knew what “yours” meant.

Zoom calls were cut mid-sentence, leaving bosses forever frozen in judgmental pixel-blur. TikTok influencers attempted to upload content using cellular data, resulting in grainy videos that were promptly ignored. A 17-year-old reportedly tried to Google “how to survive without Wi-Fi” before realizing the depth of their error.

“I had to make eye contact with my roommate.”
“I pressed ‘refresh’ for 29 minutes before realizing I was the problem.”
“I read… a book?”

These were just a few responses from the field during what some experts are calling a brief but devastating internet collapse. Grocery stores saw a 600% increase in sad people buying snacks they no longer had streaming content to eat in front of. One man was spotted licking a router, whispering “connect to me, please.”

The timeline of events is sobering:

• 3:17 PM: Outage begins
• 3:21 PM: Entire household begins yelling at modem simultaneously
• 3:25 PM: Twitter begins trending “IS IT JUST ME”
• 3:32 PM: A local teen tries to connect to a neighbor’s Wi-Fi and accidentally joins their printer
• 3:47 PM: Connection restored, but the emotional damage lingers

When the Wi-Fi finally returned, so did the memes—but something was lost. Trust. Innocence. The will to live without constant digital validation.

Local officials held a press conference via livestream to assure the public that “everything’s fine now,” although the stream buffered three times and cut off halfway through a sentence.

In the aftermath, emergency services have issued a satirical tech news alert: “Be prepared. The next outage could last 45 minutes.” Suggested preparedness tips include downloading all seasons of your comfort show in advance, printing a meme binder, and making peace with your offline self.

In other news, a new app was launched to track Wi-Fi outages and notify you when you’re still disconnected. It requires Wi-Fi to function. Naturally.