How the internet kept running even as society closed down around it

I’m subscribed to r/SysAdmin. It was pretty interesting to watch that subreddit as social distancing measures came into effect. Lots of companies needed to make a lot of adjustments, fast. Networks had to be setup, laptops had to be acquired, VPN capacity needed to be scaled.

Sysadmins have a pretty thankless job, but they really deserve just as much praise as healthcare workers for what they accomplished at the opening of this pandemic. There are lots of stories on that subreddit of achieving impossible deadlines and keeping companies running in the middle of massive logistical changes.

So, this is all to say, kudos to the sysadmins out there who keep everything running smoothly!

> What if, just as the medical-care crisis started to spiral in New York City, in Detroit, in New Orleans, the internet in those places had stopped working—an hour at a time, a couple of hours in the late afternoon? What if the internet had slowed to half its normal speed?

But this has been my experience. I've been working remotely for ~9 years and saw a change soon after the lockdown started. I began having sporadic network trouble, usually in the morning. Some days my connection is might as well have been shut off completely. The other day I was seeing 2743ms of latency on all outside connections. Many days the wifi at the library down the street is better. That said, it has been working a lot more than not.

I've watched our IT guy doing a lot of heavy lifting to make it possible for the rest of the staff to work remotely and I'm sure lots of IT people are overworked right now.

that's a fun what-if to explorer.. there are lot of these. maybe write a sci-fi book?