bhaskar saikia

This morning, I woke up thinking it would be just another ordinary day. A cup of tea, a few emails, some writing, and the steady hum of the digital world carrying me forward. Instead, I walked straight into what I can only call a digital outage day—a day where every single thing I tried to do electronically refused to work.

Emails wouldn’t send, websites wouldn’t load, forms wouldn’t submit, apps froze at the worst possible moments. It felt as if some invisible force had quietly unplugged the universe around me.

And as frustration simmered through the day, a strange thought crossed my mind: When I was a teenager, I never imagined that one day people would suffer from “digital problems.”

Back then, our issues were different—tangible, physical, human. If something broke, you could hold it in your hand. If something hurt, you could point to the part where it ached. Our problems were loud, obvious, and often repairable with tools, time, or a good conversation.

We had:

• Physical problems — scraped knees, feverish nights, broken cycles, power cuts.
• Mental problems — exam stress, heartbreak, insecurities we didn’t yet know how to name.
• Spiritual problems — questions of purpose, identity, faith, and belonging.

But digital problems? The idea never even existed.

Today, however, a single glitch in the digital ecosystem can bring an entire day crashing down. It isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a new form of modern anxiety. A locked account can feel like losing access to a part of your identity. A failed upload can feel like your work has been swallowed by a void. A buffering icon can suddenly carry the weight of a full stop in your life’s momentum.

It’s curious how intangible these problems are. They don’t leave scars, yet they exhaust us. They don’t show up on the body, yet they occupy the mind. They aren’t spiritual, yet they shake our faith—faith in systems, in technology, sometimes in ourselves.

And digital problems come with a peculiar emotional cocktail: frustration mixed with helplessness stirred with a pinch of disbelief.

Because how do you reason with something you cannot touch or see? How do you process a problem that disappears the moment someone else says, “It’s working on my device”?

Some days, like today, the universe hits the mute button on your digital world, and you’re reminded that the system you trust is, after all, just a fragile web of cables, codes, and clouds.