It was 5.30am on November 22, 2012 when Greg Walsh had his first inkling that the internet had stopped working. As a farm manager near Warrnambool, he had risen early to check his email and send instructions to the farm managers he oversaw. Except on this morning, his home connection to the internet wasn’t working. That was not entirely unheard of but he discovered his mobile phone connection was also down. So too was his home phone. It took a much older form of communication – radio – to learn that a fire had damaged the Telstra exchange. The mystery was solved but its ramifications were only just becoming clear.