Then the news hit: Twitter is down. Twitter. Is. Down.

Upon hearing this, I rushed to the street, to see hundreds or more people fleeing their homes, grabbing one another, shaking each other by the shoulders, asking how this could be possible.

I drove through Cupertino and Mountain View and discovered that buildings once occupied with quiet cubicles, bothersome copiers, and endless meetings on riveting topics such as enterprise-level IT security were now in ruins. Office chairs torn to shreds, shattered glass everywhere, and the lowercase letter ‘t’ that is emblematic of the Twitter brand sloppily tagged onto the walls of once towering buildings that were filled with Silicon Valley’s brightest.

All along I sensed that everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it finally did. News started spreading around town (without Twitter?!) that Facebook was also experiencing problems. Stunned, I stood in the middle of the seemingly war-torn street, my jaw agape, contemplating the meaning of the events that had transpired.

I had to make a split decision. Knowing that chaos would ensue, I packed some canned food, a bottle of penicillin, my BlackBerry, and some raw fish (Pompano, to be exact) I managed to steal from Marina Food in Cupertino, and fled town. I quickly realized that I was not alone; hundreds, no, thousands had setup camps outside of the bay area, in desolate areas such as…..whatever is east of the Bay Area.

As I prepared to plan out the rest of my life as a nomad, I got a text on my BlackBerry. “Hey, it’s Mark. Twitter’s back up, and Facebook seems to be working intermittently”.

Oh.

I dusted off my dockers shirt, did my best to straighten out the crease in my slacks, and started to make my way back to the office. I looked up and saw that the sun was starting to creep out from behind the clouds. That’s not even me using a clever literary device to imply hope and well-being, seriously, it just got sunnier, check the weather report. “Everything is going to be ok”, I thought, “everything is going to be ok”.