The Day the Internet Went Quiet

It happened at 9:17 a.m. on a Tuesday.
No warning. No countdown. No dramatic global alert.
The internet simply… paused.
For exactly three minutes and forty-two seconds, nothing loaded. Messages froze mid-sentence. Streaming videos stopped buffering. Online games locked in place. Traders stared at unmoving charts. Influencers refreshed blank feeds in disbelief.
At first, people blamed their Wi-Fi.
Then their routers.
Then their service providers.
But when the silence stretched beyond a minute, something unfamiliar crept in — stillness.
In offices, employees looked up from their screens and noticed each other. In cafés, people glanced around instead of down. On public transport, strangers briefly met eyes — unsure what to do without glowing rectangles to absorb their attention.
For three minutes and forty-two seconds, humanity experienced something rare in the digital age: forced presence.