All day Autumn Belfontaine had been going from one to another website, trying to find someplace that would give her news from Earth. Yet again and again she got one or another error message — mostly 404 Not Found, but a lot of 500-series errors that related to gateways along the route to the servers where the webpages were stored.
She tried not to listen too closely to the sales director complaining about how he’d been just about to close on a deal with a client who would provide the station with a hefty amount of advertising money, right when the teleconference link went flooey. Yes, it was another data point that might help IT run down whatever was messing up their Internet connectivity, but beyond that it wasn’t really any of her business.
On the other hand, it was something to distract her from the rapidly approaching evening drive-time newscast. Although nobody was sure just how many people tuned in to Shepardsport Pirate Radio via their cars’ mobile Internet or satellite radio, it was still an important part of their audience, and right now the station wouldn’t have it. Worse, she had almost nothing to base her evening newscast on except local events and a few bits that had dribbled through from other lunar settlements.
Autumn looked up at the newsroom clock. Fifteen minutes and she needed to be on the air, delivering the day’s news. What used to be called “world news,” although now it would be covering three worlds, if she could just connect with anything from Earth or Mars. Then the national news, and finally local news.
But right now local was all she had, other than a few incidents in Grissom City and some of the smaller settlements of the Tranquility East region. And even the local news was more on the order of public service announcements and human interest than actual news. People around here were by and large pretty orderly.
On the other hand, there was the Internet outage — but right now she was uncertain how much she should report on it, so long as its cause remained uncertain. And there were valid reasons not to broadcast just how badly they had been affected, especially while they also had no idea who might be behind whatever malware might be behind it.
She picked up her phone. Should she try to contact someone down at IT, see where they were, what level of embargo she should observe on information about the situation?
However, they were probably still busy, if not as overwhelmingly so as when this mess first started. She still remembered overhearing one of the IT people talking about the help desk switchboard being nearly overwhelmed with incoming calls at the beginning.
Better to text her contact at IT. SMS used less bandwidth, and it was asynchronous, so it wouldn’t interrupt someone who was busy with something else.
And then, with the text on its way, it was time to put together her news report for the evening. One with the report on the Internet outage, assuming it was OK to talk about it, and a second with some suitable filler to occupy the necessary airtime. And then it was off to the DJ booth to broadcast.