In 1998 I worked for a local ISP and would occasionally work the late night shift by myself since we offered 24/7 phone support. It was a great job... go to work and spend hours surfing the internet at insanely fast speeds. One night a huge thunderstorm hit and the lights went out, my computer shut down and then about 3 seconds later it came back. The whole time I could still hear the server room humming along. I thought to myself "battery backups are amazing" and didn't give it another thought. Until about 20 minutes later when that server room hum went silent. I was dumbstruck. My computer was still on. The lights were still on. But the whole internet for our region came through that room and it was no longer on. I had no idea what to do... I sat there for anywhere between 5 seconds to 10 minutes trying to figure out what my first step should be and then the phone rang. I answered it expecting an upset customer wanting to know why her Netscape wasn't working, but instead it was my boss, the owner of the company. He never called in, and he sounded chipper and said that he just wanted to make sure everything was ok with the storm that had just come through. I stammered "Uh, so, you don't know what's going on?" He lived about 30 minutes away but he was in the office in 10 minutes and had about 150 feet of extension cords. We ran the extension cords over to the outlets that were powered by the building's generator and got them hooked up to the server room to get it back online.
I've never experienced a worse silence in my life since.