Freddy's Cyberwar Scare

I came home yesterday to the news that North Korea's internet, such as it is, had slowed to a crawl. My first thought was maybe it was some sort of retaliation for their alleged role in the Sony hack. My gut feeling is it wasn't them, but I wouldn't put it past the U.S. government to try and get even regardless.

I went about my computer business as usual until about 1:15ish when I went to check gmail before closing my browser and gmail wouldn't open all the way. Then I tried yahoo mail. Browser just stalled until I finally got one of those Server Not Found messages. My modem showed everything was ok but I'd been booted from the internet.

I started wondering if maybe some sort of cyberwar was taking place? Such an event could be a disaster to everyone since computers run pretty much everything nowadays. Are the North Koreans retaliating against us now? What to do?

First thing I did was reboot my modem. It started up again and showed all green lights on it, but the modem icon on my monitor showed an exclamation mark and I still couldn't connect. Damn! Close to panic because the world was about to end, I decided to call AT&T and see if they knew what was going on. 

I called their 800 number and was routed to a real person rather quickly. I explained my situation hoping he'd tell me it was just a local outage, that I wasn't alone and they'd have it fixed soon. Nope. He said there were some problems in a few locations in California but not our area and that their equipment showed everything on my end ok and that I was connected to the internet.

Downside to that was the problem seemed to be I was alone with my problem. The upside was there wasn't some cyberwar going on. Whew!

The guy starts to walk me through a diagnostic procedure. Then I start wondering about the exclamation mark on the modem icon and thought maybe I should reboot the computer to see if that would help. He agreed. I rebooted the computer and everything was back to normal. I was back online. I thanked the guy for his help and hung up.

Close one. Had me going there until AT&T told me everything was ok.