When technology breaks

We had server problems today, especially during one of my classes when the server was down school-wide for pretty much the entire period. I noticed some interesting things happen when this occurred:
First of all, I was happy with my ability to roll with it - even though my lesson plan for today relied on technology for the whole period, I came up with a workable back-up plan as soon as I started to realize something was wrong.
I think more interesting to me was my student's inability to roll with it - they were at a loss, completely. First, they complained that it was taking longer than usual to log in - but didn't connect that to something being wrong. They were happy for the excuse to fool around for a few minutes, thinking that the computers would fix themselves and be up in no time. As I realized there was a bigger problem at play, I was simultaneously trying to alert our IT support of the problem and trying to alert my students to the fact that we needed to change our plans. Interestingly, several students did not seem to realize this was a system-wide problem and thought it was only their computer that wasn't working. (I ask myself - are they just that self-centered? Did they not look around and notice the trend? Are they not good at seeing patterns?) In fact, even after the problem was solved, all day I had students telling me about the problem they'd had in such and such class in the morning, unaware that it was a school-wide breakdown that had occurred. I can't help but wonder about their critical reasoning and pattern recognition skills after a day like this!