How a Suburban Mom Broke the Internet and Basically Destroyed Everything

A Report from the Unified Global Alliance

On behalf of the Grand Overseer, we appreciate your patience as we used our collective efforts to unravel what caused last year’s global economic collapse. After a seven-month investigation spanning four continents, we can now conclude the issue originated with 33-year-old mother Amy McDowell, a resident of the former American state of Wisconsin.

Evidence indicates that Mrs. McDowell was not historically a violent person. According to a close friend, she did not even like smashing bugs with a rolled up magazine, squealing when she did it, “like she was the one having her guts smeared across the underside of a Frontgate catalog.”

Indeed, in her twenties, her life was marked by peace. Neighbors remember seeing her cradling her firstborn through her living room window while reading a book. Her mailman has memories of her smiling as she pushed a stroller slowly down the street. A barista noted once seeing Mrs. McDowell rocking a car seat with her knee while drinking a turmeric chai tea. “She made it look easy,” the barista said, adding that Mrs. McDowell breastfed effortlessly, quickly shrinking back to her pre-baby weight after only a few months.

But almost a decade later, now a mother of four, the beauty of child rearing had morphed into a daily experience that, according to a close family member, “more closely resembled guerrilla warfare.” Our committee can safely conclude this was humbling. While Mrs. McDowell once thought of herself as a confident, college-educated woman, she was losing skirmishes hourly against an enemy who paraded about the battlefield “with dirty underwear on their heads and permanent marker smeared across their faces.”

“they R savages,” she told her sister via text message.

This brings us to May 11th of last year. With the help of nearby Ring cameras, we know that Mrs. McDowell and her children left their residence at approximately 10:41am local time and drove to a nearby Trader Joe’s, arriving at 10:49am.

Shoppers remember Mrs. McDowell already appearing frazzled by the time she reached the entrance, muttering to her six-year-old daughter that “I can’t believe it took you ninety minutes to put pants on.” Another shopper shared seeing Mrs. McDowell in the vegetable aisle where one of her sons flicked a booger from his nose that landed directly on her bottom lip. As the other children pointed and laughed, Mrs. McDowell grimaced and wiped it clean using a produce baggie she tore from the roll they keep near the bell peppers.

After leaving the store, their next stop was the nearby Chick-fil-A where, before ordering at 11:53am, drive-thru microphones picked up Mrs. McDowell saying, “I don’t even know why we’re doing this, we have a whole car full of fresh food!” Store records note that at 12:01pm, Mrs. McDowell made a second pass through the drive-thru line, this time for forks, because “My kids just announced they don’t like touching nuggets with their bare hands.” Various unintelligible screaming could be heard in the background.

Mrs. McDowell was back home at 12:13pm, which brings us to the incident at the forefront of our investigation and one that ultimately affected every human on Earth.

Upon their return, battery data from the McDowells’ electronic devices show a sharp uptick in usage. Data obtained from content provider subpoenas specifically show:

• 3 iPads connecting to Disney+

• 1 iPad connecting to YouTube kids

• 2 Gabb watches texting each other emojis

• 1 Samsung smart television streaming an episode of “Blippy”

• 1 iPhone looping the Encanto song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”

Notably, location services tell us all 8 of these devices were within three square feet of each other inside the McDowell home.

This lasted until 12:37pm local time, when the McDowells’ next door neighbors report hearing children fighting with each other followed quickly by Mrs. McDowell exiting what sounded like the bathroom then yelling in frustration at the top of her lungs: “THAT’S IT! I AM SO DONE WITH ALL OF THIS CRAP!”

The neighbors then heard an indecipherable smashing noise that repeated “at least a dozen times.” When she was done, the house was silent.

With the aid of the world’s leading audio engineers, we were able to recreate the sound and can confidently assert that what the neighbors heard was Mrs. McDowell destroying her family’s WiFi router with a meat tenderizer.

This rash act was complicated by the fact that Mr. McDowell was working from home that day, and was in the process of receiving government-designed malware he had been tasked with testing as part of his job with what is now formerly known as the United States Department of Defense.

Rather than the malware being safely delivered to Mr. McDowell’s CPU through encrypted channels, the electric surge triggered by Mrs. McDowell’s meat tenderizer sent the malware directly into a dozen local networks by mistake.

Within twenty minutes, the malware had spread to the metro Milwaukee area. Within an hour, every computer, smart phone, tablet, and internet-based service in the entire world had been rendered permanently useless.

As we all experienced, the next 125 days were filled with civil unrest, rampant starvation, and revolution. Unfortunately, by the time communications were restored and Wisconsin was reconstituted as part of the Unified Global Alliance, Mrs. McDowell and her family were nowhere to be found.

Despite all our efforts to make contact with them, the McDowells have yet to reconnect to the internet with any of their known electronic devices. This lines up with testimony from former friends that suggests Mrs. McDowell’s psychotic break on the afternoon of May 11 was likely the first step in her radicalization.

A woman matching Amy McDowell’s description was recently spotted in rural Ohio trading quail eggs for raw milk, but by the time Unified Global Alliance authorities arrived, all they could find was a turmeric chai teabag and a fresh pair of stroller tracks that disappeared into the forest.

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