Today’s Twitter silence, the result of a virus attack that lasted at least six or seven hours if not longer, probably caused tens if not hundreds of thousands of Twitter addicts great separation anxiety…at first. Then, I’ll wager, they began to get used to the idea. Perhaps some of them actually did something with their off time — took a long walk, talked with someone they’d been meaning to talk to but never had, thought, daydreamed, went to a hardware store, etc.

A day after the 1994 L.A. earthquake (the fairly big one that happened at 4:30 or 5 in the morning) I was asked by my Entertainment Weekly editors to get Hollywood stars to talk about how they’d dealt with the rock ‘n’ roll. So I called Warren Beatty and asked for a quote or two. Beatty wouldn’t talk about the broken glass in his mountaintop Mulholland Drive home, but he said that the quake may have been a good thing by keeping people from doing their usual-usual. EW used the following quote: “It gave us cause for the pause we should all be taking anyway.”