Early yesterday my DSL line and internet feed went dark. Later I learned that the outage was widespread at least in this area. Turned out it was an "outage" at the central office of AT&T. Where that is and what is does could not be determined. So far no one can find out what the problem really was.

Though I do not use AT&T, my provider, and probably a lot of others, does use the AT&T line, so we were all caught in the so-called outage. After many calls and the usual expected hassle, we were told that the problem would be fixed ASAP. This evening, roughly 36 hours later, we are back on line.

The point of all this to me is how easy it must be to bring the whole system down by some very obvious means. And it could be down for a very long time. What is striking is that almost no one I know has much of a back up system in place to replace the internet other than taking a laptop to a distant Starbucks or the like, but if it all comes down, then what.

Best to think about how to CYA should such a likelihood occur, imo.