Yesterday’s Stupidly Hot Weather Literally Broke The Internet
Take that, Kim.
For someone who earns all of their money and lives at least half of their life on the internet, I have an embarrassingly simple understanding of how it actually works. Cables are involved at some point. Fibre is a thing that helps. At the end of all these wires and magic waves floating through the air, the internet comes together and lives in a big warehouse in the desert.
Don’t even bother correcting me. In the same way that some day I’m going to learn French or finish Infinite Jest, at some point in my life I’ll read a few books and become less of a derp about technology.
But for the moment, I have to explain the story to you like this. Yesterday Perth reached the brain-melting temperature of 44 degrees and the warehouse where all the lolcats run around on their copper treadmills couldn’t handle it. For six and a half hours, thousands of iiNet customers all across the country had their access cut completely because the heat had actually broken the internet.
Take that, Kim.
Due to record breaking temperatures, iiNet Toolbox, Email and our Corporate Websites are unavailable. Apologies for any inconvenience caused
— iiNet (@iiNet) January 5, 2015
“Due to record breaking temperatures in our Perth data centre earlier today, we shut down our servers as a precautionary measure,” an iiNet spokesman told Fairfax yesterday. The problems were all resolved by about 11pm last night — presumably by sending a hoard of iiNet employees down to the ol’ meme factory armed with those neon handheld fans that shoot water at your face. Crisis averted.
My ISP @iiNet is down because it's too hot (44C) at their servers. That's the most Australian thing I've heard. Too hot for Internet.
— Lisy K (@lisyk) January 5, 2015
As we head into the hottest month of the year (at a time when each year has inconveniently been hotter than the last) this problem obviously doesn’t bode well for iiNet. As our country’s second largest DSL internet provider and market leader in giant smarmy-faced billboards in the CBD, they probably need a better system in place to deal with the overworked Twitter switchboards, red-hot piles of Youtube cable and what have you. Many of their customers have since asked for partial deductions off their next bill as compensation.
But it’s not all bad news! We now know that when global warming takes over and the internet houses finally collapse to heat exhaustion, we’ll all be able to cook eggs anywhere we like.
FREE BBQ, GUYS!