Internet Down Worldwide

IN A rare outage, visitors to the Internet today were greeted with a message reading “error 999”, leaving billions of users worldwide without any access, causing trillions of euros in lost revenue.

At approximately 17:34 GMT, the global system of interconnected mainframe, personal, and wireless computer networks seemingly crashed without warning, the first time since it was launched in 1995, and hasn’t returned since.

“We don’t know what happened,” said CEO of the internet Michael Choo. “This is very unusual and our team of developers are working hard to get to the root of the problem. We should hopefully have the internet back up and running sometime soon.”

It is understood that several major companies, including Google and Facebook are already taking legal action over the outage, which is costing them in the region of $2bn a minute.

“This is the last thing we expected,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his personal page today. “For this to happen in 2016 is unforgivable. We will be seeking compensation for the dip in earnings.”

A source working at the Internet, which is based in Switzerland, revealed technicians have already failed numerous times in turning the worldwide web back on, raising fears that it may take days rather than hours to fix.

“Engineers cut the power and left it off for ten seconds, and tried turning it on again to no avail,” confirmed the source. “Hopefully it’s just a dodgy router or something.”