Internet Down for An Entire Hour!

Tonight’s top story: the Princeton network was down for a few hours late Sunday night!The headline reads like a bad Onion article, but this actually seems to have generated some buzz.We walk-talked (the phenomenon of having a mini-conversation with someone while walking without actually slowing down or stopping to talk) to a girl storming down University Place who was genuinely angry about the outage, lamenting all the work she could have been doing.She had a point. Sunday nights are a valuable work night, getting ahead for the week or (in all documented cases to date) catching up.But there isn’t much you can’t do when the internet goes down. For whatever reason Blackboard is accessible even when the network is down.Why that matters after the jump!It's a big deal because so much of the off-line work we do comes from online hosts. Few, if any of us rely on in-class handouts and hardcopies, instead printing our own problem sets and reading.But even if the rest of the internet’s down, all those materials are still available.Then there’s the question of how much work actually gets down on Sunday nights. Ostensibly reserved for homework, the evening is usually spent aimlessly trolling the interwebs before the night’s episode of “Entourage” makes it way onto Megavideo.Which is probably what the first person that noticed the internet outage was doing, anyways.But email, in the form of smart phones, stayed active during the outage, and all breaking news (most of it of the sports variety) was just a click away on the aforementioned phones.Obviously, since you’re reading this, the internet is back up. No one, as far as we know, died as a direct result. Sure, maybe you’re up past three on a Sunday night. But you probably would have been, anyways. (image source: http://www.techkaki.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/firefox-1024x640.jpg)