You start the day by checking your phone, but there are no messages, news alerts or emails. You try to call relatives to check in but the line’s dead. Children playing in the streets outside strikes you as unusual and when you pop into a shop for groceries, the tills are down – and who carries cash?
You turn to a patrolling policeman, wondering if you’ve woken up in the 1980s; he tells you all communication is down and to try to stay out of trouble because the hospitals cannot take mobile phone calls.
This is not the beginning of a dystopian fiction but a recent reality for Shetlanders after damage to an undersea fibre optic cable caused a near communication blackout ten days ago.
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