Emergency Call Only

What do you do usually in the morning when you wake up? Be honest, you look at your phone, do you?

My day started early today. Nick is going to his next mission. He has a lot of ammunition and such so I volunteered to drive him and his 3 heavy bags to the "meeting point". I was a bit disappointed when I saw that my mobile service is not available - Emergency Call Only. It was very unusual. I used to rely on my smartphone in many cases, such as traffic jams, the route, or other stuff that require mobile Internet, or eventually, plain old communication. All was unavailable.

I did what an average user would do in such a situation - turned on/off mobile data, then plain mode, and finally the smartphone itself. All in vain. So I just used my memory and spatial orientation as much as it possible early in the morning to drive Nick to his point and find a way back home. I was thinking about finding a repair center as I was sure it was my smartphone's issue (it already had one recently), but the radio informed me about the global problem that mobile SP is experiencing today all around Ukraine. Thank God for the radio and WiFi. But it is one of the 2 biggest SPs in Ukraine, to give you an idea.

This is already the second large-scale problem that has arisen in Kyiv in particular for the last couple of days. Previously, our metro urgently closed 6 stations on one of the branches due to problems with groundwater. We have only 3 metro lines in Kyiv, and those 6 stations connect the city center with new densely built-up districts. You can imagine that all Kyivans were discussing this, at least until this morning.

It turned out that the mobile provider was subjected to a large-scale hacker attack. It was later reported that one of the big banks also repelled a major DDoS attack today. I fought back, so everything is fine. Unlike the mobile operator, which is still not working.

But let's look at the situation from a different angle. It made me think back to the early days of the full-scale war. I was expecting the worst, like a loss of electricity, mobile and TV service but it never happened. This led to a certain cognitive dissonance because this is a logical consequence of a military attack on you. Now we know why. Russia was expecting a quick surrender of Kyiv and then the whole country, so they would take everything under their control. No need to destroy. But turned out a different way. So now they stopped playing the liberation game and just destroying everything to the ground.

But where was I? Today we experienced the out-of-service of the major SP and this is a real problem but not more. If this had happened at the beginning of the invasion, the consequences would have been much more dire. Today showed that. The air raid alarm isn't available in some cities. The office infrastructure has issues all day. And I will lose some amount of money because I couldn't make changes to my account (it uses MFA).

So it's bad that it happened today but good it didn't happen back then. The angle is important.🙂

Eventually, Nick will leave tomorrow, and this means that he will have an extra night at home.