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If you’ve ever wondered how a whole country can be without continuous internet for hours on end, including any form of mobile internet on our smartphones, look no further than the glorious Switzerland of the Middle East, the Democratic Republic of Lebanon, circa April 2017.

Leading up to this stupendous first day of April were promises of better internet by the end of March. Some people had already noticed their modems syncing at speeds that were, previously, only a far-fetched dream in the country.

As it stands, they’re no longer a dream on April 1st, but probably an immense fantasy more grand than Harry Potter.

Even as they were adamant to deny the existence of any problem, as they usually do, even our mobile carriers had to admit that this whole business of you frantically trying to refresh anything on your phone to try and see what is up with your connectivity is not on you.

My bitching didn’t even help fix things and I wasn’t alone in my problems:

It turns out that Ogero, the supplier of all internet in the country, was doing some heavy testing which resulted in the entire country being taken off the grid, as per the tweets of Imad Kreidieh, head of Ogero:

Truth be told, Imad Kreidieh has been doing a tremendous job as the head of Ogero so far. If there’s anything good to come out of this, it’s how he has handled it: he didn’t blame others for the problems of the institution he’s running, he was clear about what was being done, and later on he tweeted the following:

I’m very genuinely taken aback by how professional Mr. Kreidieh is. Is he really a Lebanese person in a position of power? Maybe this is the actual April Fools’ prank being played on us? Tawa Nicolas, the creator of this blog’s iOS app, WHICH YOU CAN DOWNLOAD HERE, said it best:

It’s not all bad though. I mean, think about all those MBs you’ve saved everyone! Here’s hoping that on April 1st, 2018 we would actually have a country whose internet speed is not apparently: