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Seven Days Without the Internet/Facts

Documentary fact file

What we know.What the film changes.

Eight concise, source-linked facts that define the real-world foundation beneath the cinematic scenario.

A rain-darkened British city with blank digital screens during a communications outage
01 · Scenario rule

The film removes the public internet—not electricity

Power, radio and isolated local or private systems continue wherever their own infrastructure allows. That boundary stops the film becoming a generic apocalypse.

Matter & Maybe scenario definition
02 · Scale

Around six billion people used the internet in 2025

That was roughly 74% of the global population, which shows the human scale of any truly global disruption.

ITU Facts and Figures 2025
03 · Network reality

Outages would not look identical everywhere

Different providers, routes, fallback arrangements, backup power and local systems would fail or recover at different times.

Ofcom resilience guidance
04 · Payments

A terminal is only one link in a payment chain

Authorisation and settlement depend on connected merchants, acquirers, schemes and banks. Limited offline rules do not recreate the missing network.

Bank of England operational resilience
05 · Behaviour

Contactless is now ordinary payment behaviour

UK consumers made 18.9 billion contactless card payments in 2024. A communications failure therefore interrupts habit as well as infrastructure.

UK Finance, 2025
06 · Food systems

Food security depends on more than the amount of food

The UK’s official framework includes physical, human and economic infrastructure across the chain from production to consumption.

UK Food Security Report 2024
07 · Supply

Britain’s food network combines domestic and international supply

In 2025, 58% of UK domestic consumption came from UK production by unprocessed farmgate value, 23% from the EU and 19% from elsewhere.

Defra Food Statistics 2026
08 · Interpretation

Seven days is a stress test, not a forecast

The complete outage is imagined. The dependencies being put under pressure are grounded in published resilience and supply-chain evidence.

Matter & Maybe methodology

Read before watching

The boundaries that keep the story honest.

  1. 01

    The public internet is unavailable worldwide for seven days.

  2. 02

    Electricity is not automatically removed by the premise.

  3. 03

    Radio, local systems and isolated private networks may continue where technically possible.

  4. 04

    The order and severity of consequences are presented as reasoned scenarios, not universal predictions.