Delhi, March 15, 2050: Omninet cloud traffic suffered a worldwide blackout for 13 minutes today when a bad security patch applied by Yahoogle caused satellite based routing to crash.
"It was 13 minutes where the world stood still," said Global OmniCall magnate, Majit Singh. "All our vidphone lines were down, updates to virtual billboards and store shelves stalled, television and direct to eyeware feed went black," he said.
Mr Singh has estimated it will take his company alone two days and millions of dollars to resolve all the customer issues created by the Yahoogle patch.
A spokesperson for Yahoogle Omninet said the company reacted immediately when the issue with the new patch became apparent, and normal service was continued for all non-satellite based traffic. She refused to speculate on the global economic cost of the blackout, "That will be an issue for our legal advisors to address," she said.
Not all consumer groups were upset at the blackout. "For 13 blessed minutes today there was silence," said the CEO of the anti-omninet Institute for Information Management, Maureen Haerdigan.
"The bus stops stopped hawking fast food at passengers, shopping center walls weren't strobing advertising, the prices on the supermarket shelves weren't changing in front of our eyes, and even the vidphone spammers couldn't get through," she said. "People on public transit took off their eyeware and talked to each other. It was a revolution."
European Republic Anti-Monopoly Trust chairperson, Yuri Vedloff, said the blackout was more evidence, if it was needed, of the dangers of concentrating global information traffic coordination in the hands of only one or two suppliers.
"People questioned our motives at the turn of the century, when we aggressively pursued large software and infrastructure monopolies for non-competitive behaviour," he said. "I think now they realise that our motives were based in fear of the reality we have seen again today."
Mr Vedloff was referring to a situation at the turn of the century where nearly all business and leisure computing systems relied on the operating system of a single provider. Concerted efforts by the EU to dismantle the monopoly were ineffective, largely due to the financial pressure the company was able to bring to bear against the EU legislators. Eventually that company went the way of the dinosaur, and Yahoogle emerged dominant.
"The genius of Yahoogle made the operating system irrelevent," Taiwan Provincial Bank Omninet Analyst Kevin Lee said, "Yahoogle services and applications can run on anything with a chip in it, as long as it is hooked up to Omninet."
"And what isn't?" he asked.
Today, for 13 minutes, a lot wasn't.
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