VANCOUVER – Canadian tech stocks took a massive hit this week as JavaHut’s Wi-Fi went down, bottlenecking the work of the country’s fastest rising startups.

“I was in my third hour of drinking a single coffee when suddenly, everything grinded to a halt,” says Dirk Johansen, Chief Technology Officer of once-promising Vancouver startup Churnt. “I had to lay off half my unpaid interns, right then and there.”

Other companies were able weather the storm, thanks to dispersing their development teams across free Wi-Fi sites.

“Mature startups know to implement a robust network of  redundancies,” says security analyst Marissa McDonald. “Even small firms need emergency lists of friends’ couches and public libraries, to secure free internet access in times of crisis.”

Yet the JavaHut outage spells disaster for many tech ventures, a situation that threatens to devalue investment portfolios throughout the country.

Insiders suggest that the Bank of Canada is rapidly tabling plans to reduce interest rates and restore investor confidence, amid fears that Tuesday’s news could trigger a micro-depression like that of May 2015, when a Gastown ramen restaurant changed its Wi-Fi password, resulting in the sudden bankruptcies of dozens of tech startups.

Read the Edmonton Weststar for more in depth analysis of the crudest industry gossip. “Trust: free on the internet.”