How fast does Wi-Fi spread? I couldn't find it [1]here .

And is it temperature dependent, like honey?

[1] https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

I doubt it travels merely at the speed of a sheep in vacuum. Must be a lot faster

I'll get me coat

Like “Snot off a stick”

An unladen African swallow.

That'll be the hypothetical round sheep of zero mass.

Not as fast as the speed of darkness.

Hat tip to Tel. RIP

"How fast does Wi-Fi spread?"

Almost as fast as gossip through a small village.

"And is it temperature dependent, like honey?"

Probably not. Although gossip is faster in the winter than in the summer.

I once entered a small glass-walled air conditioned server room in the middle of a room filled with cubicles. Everyone curls see me from the waist up. I dropped a pencil and bent down to pick it up. I didn’t touch a keyboard or mouse or button.

When I stood up, everyone in the office thought I caused all their terminals to freeze. I laughed and they were ok because it was a regular client who knew me.

I’ll never forget it as a classic botched cause and effect error humans make.

Admit you dropped the pencil across some open wires or ports causing a short... You were just lucky nobody could see... ;)

You said you didnt touch a keyboard, mouse or button... You didnt say anything about wires/ports/other electrical equipment, now did you...? We're on to you AC... :P

I used to run a photography summer school course at the school where I work.

One day, I'd just set everything up, introduced myself to the group then as soon as I pressed F5 to start the powerpoint everything went dark in the room.

Looking outside showed the other parts of the school site were equally without power, indeed the whole village had slipped off the grid.

Luckily, we have a secondary site about a mile up the road, so we decamped to a spare classroom there, which turned out to make the course better, as we had a lot more interesting things to photograph in the afternoon, so I ran the course from that site for the rest of the summer...

No negative outcome from the event then.

Trying to understand the downvote on this. Fat fingers or an El Reg reader too young to understand the allusion?

I've decided that some people are so joyless they just downvote everything...

You need to focus on the subject at hand, don't worry about the negatives at this stage. It'll all be over in a flash.

Took you a while to develop that, didn't it?

Probably doesn't know how to filter their RAW thoughts.

Joking aside, I assumed it was a kid who is probably too young to remember a world without the iphone.

The story might still be developing as we have only seen a snapshot of the situation. Not the whole picture. It could still easily slide into being a complete disaster.

Yes, could be a bit of a red-light moment.

You should have pressed f5.6

Sounds like some light entertainment

He shouldnt have kept people in the dark...

Somebody yesterday told me a very similar story was the source for this visiting Cambridge yesterday……

A distressingly long period of time ago I was working for a local authority. The facilities people had scheduled some power work in the Town Hall and we had to power off the computer room we had there. I, as the UNIX admin had cronned a shutdown on all my Solaris boxes and a few new-fangled Linux machines. To be sure, I had issued an init 0 to the Sun boxes and went in to enter power off at the OK prompt. I walked up to one of my test machines to do do the do. At the exact moment I entered return, someone flipped the switch for the whole computer room. I knew my Windows colleagues hadn't finished their carefullly timed series of power offs so I had a moment of (unfounded) clenched buttocks. The lead windoze guy laughed rather a lot a my expense when he saw the look on my face.

I was once installing something in a school (I don't recall what now) - powered by USB, so I plugged a USB PSU into an extension lead under the reception desk.

As a great man once said: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened"

There was a bang and suddenly an overwhelming sense of silence. It took 10 minutes looking for the distribution board and finding someone with the appropriate keys. Thankfully it had only tripped the circuit covering offices, not any of the classrooms. I went back the following day with a different PSU which I'd already tested off site!

No, but I did cause the outage once ... and got away with it[0[. As I posted 4 days ago[1]:

When we were decommissioning the old Fabian Avenue telco Central Office (now home to the Charleston Village condominiums), I was given the task of making sure the electrical power to the site was off. Not just at the breaker down at the street pole, but the physical breaker at the Colorado Avenue Sub Station in Palo Alto was to be pulled, thus making certain all power was deactivated until we could make certain everything was isolated.

This would involve taking out the entire Charleston Gardens section of Palo Alto for an hour or so mid-morning, mid-week when it would cause as little disruption as possible. (Charleston Gardens is a mostly residential section of Palo Alto, bordered by Middlefield, San Antonio and Charleston roads, if you care.) The neighbors were notified the week before, both by snail-mail and people physically knocking on doors to explain and hand out the small paper notice explaining what and why.

Come the morning of the Great Event, I was selected to physically make sure the power was off at the sub-station. Cell phones being a fad of the future, I drove down the Frontage road (West Bayshore) and arrived at the the sub station promptly at 10AM. Conversation went something like this:

Me: I'm here to see that the power to the Fabian project is off.

Site Engineer: We're all ready for you, I'll get to it in a second ... or you can just throw that switch (points).

Me: OK (throws switch).

Engineer: NOT THAT SWITCH!

Most of South Palo Alto: WTF‽‽‽‽‽

Management swallowed the story that the main breaker tripping was an un-foreseen knock-on effect of the smaller section being taken down ... The Engineer and I made a bee-line for Fred's (well known dive bar on the Palo Alto/Mountain View border) as soon as he cleared up the problem, which took into the late afternoon. We're still friends.

[0] Statute of Limitations applies. I'm in the clear. I checked before I posted it the first time, years ago.

[1] Timing, as they say, is everything ...

"'Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out"

What you've essentially done is, like every social media post out there, given us the story in the headline

Please look back on previous el reg articles and see the dry wit used.

So much mileage could have been gained from MC Hammer for a story like this

HALT!

HAMMERZEIT!

Reminds me of an demonstration given by one of my lecturers at university (a true "mad/eccentric professor" type) - it was something to do with nodes and antinodes in AC circuits, and the moment he turned it on the entire city's power went out. I wonder to this day whether he mgiht have caused it...

Working the offices we were doing some cabling work under the floor of the comms room with the digital telephone system, which had bundles of cables everywhere.

I needed to move a newly installed 63A socket which had been left on top of the cable bundle. So I picked it up there was a bang and the entire site went black, a few seconds later the emergency lights kicked in and the office was silent.

Oops…..

It turned out the electricians hadn’t screwed on of the terminals in the socket properly and when I picked it up the cable had fallen out and dropped onto one of the other connectors. The short circuit too at the board in the room we were in, 5e distribution board for the comms room, then the one for the building and finally tripped the generator breaker so no emergency power…

We got everyone on site and then restored all the functions and went home, this was on a Saturday night and I had the Monday off. By the time I walked In the office Tuesday the rumour mill had me either in hospital or dead due to an electrocution…..

It was a long time ago...

I had set up the ATE (credence LT1001) and wafer prober. The setup was good.

I hit return to run the program. The lights went out, i shouted. The whole site was affected.

Eveyone evacuated the test area. (No nasty chemicals).

The FAB people evacuated asap. No power means no air extract. Nasty chemicals so get out quick.

It wasn't raining so my clean gear and me didn't get wet.

I had a similar experience.

Working at a tech college, we had students who had a classrooms of machines on which they tested pushing out machine images to hosts from an AD domain.

The AD servers, DNS and switches, and a UPS were all in a mobile 12U rack which we used to move between classrooms as required.

We were tasked with closing down the rack and moving it to another classroom.

Just as my colleague unplugged the rack from the room's mains socket, the whole building went dark. His face, as he stood there with the plug in hand was a picture.

Again, it was just a coincidental grid outage, nothing to do with what we were doing.