Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t really known what to think when Steffi Roderick had called and requested for her to come down to IT as soon as possible. Autumn had been in the middle of preparing afternoon and evening drive time newscasts, and while there was no huge time pressure, she liked to do them in one sitting for better cohesiveness.
But one of the critical skills of a journalist was the ability to be flexible. Breaking news didn’t follow anybody’s schedule, and from the sound of Steffi’s voice, whatever had just happened was both urgent and worrisome.
Now she was waiting while Steffi finished talking with several of her immediate subordinates. From the sound of it, they were talking about fallback options, but exactly what she could not determine.
Finally they wound up their conference and the three of them came filing out. As soon as Steffi came out, she looked directly at Autumn. “Glad you were able to come down so quickly. Come inside so we can talk.”
“As urgent as you sounded, I thought I’d better not delay.”
“It looks like things may be changing rapidly. Right before I called you, I was in a conference call with the IT chiefs of all the major lunar settlements, verifying what we were observing and determining our best strategies for dealing with it.”
“So we’re looking at a major change in our situation?”
“Actually, Earth’s. We’ve been picking up cascades of micro-outages in a number of major websites. E-commerce and social media in particular, but also some major news websites. We think what we are seeing is the Internet shifting to mirror sites in other locations when they lose connectivity to their primary server farms.”
“That doesn’t sound good.” Autumn recalled her old friend who was struggling to keep a radio station on the air, and what little she’d been able to offer him in the way of suggestions. “Especially if they’re losing power. Those places are supposed to have backup generators.”
“Which have finite amounts of fuel, and if they’re not getting replenished, they’ll soon be offline. We’re not seeing as bad of problems as we might, mostly because the most popular websites all are mirrored on servers up here to eliminate light-speed lag. We’re talking about finding ways to duplicate as much functionality as we can manage, but some of it is going to be tricky. We’re talking to legal teams, making sure we don’t violate copyrights in the process, but it’s really concerning that we might suddenly lose critical parts of our information infrastructure. In fact, right after we get done here, I’m going to Engineering and Medlab and making sure that they have all their essential manuals and other documents on local servers.”
“I don’t blame you at all. I’ll work on finding other ways of keeping in contact with my stringers down on Earth, so I can still get news even if all the major news websites and wire services go down.”
“Good. At least we’re used to jerry-rigging our way through things, so this should be just another challenge.”