Hang On, What If I Can't Access Seamless?

It’s Friday. You’re pushing for the weekend, which means trying to clear your inbox as much as possible before you run screaming from the office. It also means that you probably forgot to eat lunch until you realize, right around 2 PM, that growling feral cat of hunger in your stomach. But it’s pouring rain and you can’t leave your desk anyway. Fortunately, technology has given us Seamless, the magical app that lets you summon food magically through the internet with a few taps of the smartphone. Bad news, though: Seamless is down as part of Friday’s DDoS attack.

Whatever you do, DON’T PANIC. The attack, which began late Thursday evening and had targeted Internet traffic company Dyn, Inc., had been resolved just after 9 AM East Coast time on Friday. The first digital assault that took out a number of sites, including CNN, Spotify, Reddit and Twitter, has largely been resolved, but it appears that there has been a second attack, according to Dyn’s status site.

“As of 15:52 UTC [just before 12 PM Eastern], we have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” their site said. “Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

Nevermind, I take it back, time to panic.

A DDoS (or distributed denial of service) attack overwhelms DNS servers, effectively hamstringing them, and Dyn was able to resolve the first problem by 9:20 AM ET, according to their web site. But with lunch time in full swing and Seamless still down as of 1:30 PM, many people are losing their cool.

All I can say is that whatever saint is manning the Seamless Customer Service twitter account better walk away from today with a Nobel Peace Prize (or at least a commendation in their HR file).

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for all of you office-bound, hunger-enraged hostages.

It’s called the telephone. Here’s how it works:

First, you’ll have to use Google — which thank the sweet Lord is still up — to locate a phone number for the place you want to deliver from. In case it’s been a while since you’ve used Google to find a place to eat, here’s a quick primer for how to, say, find Thai food.

Next, phone number in hand, you’ll need to use the “phone” application on your smartphone. You can either look for the phone icon, which will not look like the smartphone you hold in your hand, but a dated “handset,” resembling the letter “C” in Futura Condensed. Alternatively, just perform a Spotlight search for “Phone.”

Enter the phone number and call the restaurant you want to order from. WARNING: you will be talking to an actual human, not a computer, so be prepared to practice standard social niceties (i.e., saying “thank you”) and remember that you are probably the 200th person they have taken a food order from today.

Your food should arrive via delivery person as per a standard Seamless order.

I wish you all luck during these dark, trying times.