It was pretty surreal when Spain had that hours long power cut last year.

No power, no internet, no phone signal, nada.

People who had battery radios were putting the news on and placing them on their window sills and turning up the volume so people could get updates of what the fuck was going on.

There was lots of street drinking and there was a pretty good sense of community.

This was in vallecas so not sure what it was like in the Centro

Yes. It’s pretty much always not any of those things.

After working for an ISP for a decade the first things I think of are

1. Did I do something stupid?
2. Did someone else do something stupid?
3. Did an animal do something stupid?

People in the US actually should. You have a fascist-leaning, borderline totalitarian regime which has tried to incite civil war several times, with the assumed goal of declaring martial law and suspending elections. They’re also on social media (including Lemmy!) trying to discourage people from voting, either by saying the other party is just as bad or saying it won’t do any good. It actually sounds like attacking the Internet is the next step, since they’ve been attacking education, health care, and nutrition lately. In fact, Twitter has been used to create and spread CSAM, and Twitter is run by an ally of the ruling party, almost like they want that social network banned in other countries (but it won’t be banned in the US).

Makes sense to me. When I hear explosions I wonder if it’s the start of a bloody conflict in my city.

Get [email protected] so you can communicate via text message and gps position even without internet or cell

Not weird given the current state of things. Personally, the first thing I think of is DNS. isitdns.com?

I’d say it’s not weird to wonder, but it is a little unhealthy if that’s what you assume is the truth every time.

That said, how often does internet go out for you?

I live on the same grid as a hospital so my power almost never goes out, and live close enough to several cell towers my phone can use that cell service isn’t a problem.

So if my internet goes out, I assume my provider is having technical problems.

As a non USian, I would assume it’s again another US company fuck up we need to get away from going forward.

Does anyone else think this way?

Sio Bibble does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF4Hcr7XX3c

Nope! If other nations can do it so can the US. They might be more localized and subtle or maybe they can track traffic on the internet well enough that they would prefer not to.

But it’s not the norm. Power goes out, internet goes out. It’s as likely that too many people using a network can overwhelm it if people protesting are trying to livestream and post a lot