Others have been more serious. An early fear that home broadband networks would collapse under the weight of usage was quelled by UK service providers, whose trade body, ISPA, pointed out that evening peak activity, when the nation sits down to stream Netflix and play online video games, is often 10 times the typical daytime demand.

More pressing is the fact that internet usage in general is increasing across the board. Cloudflare, which provides online infrastructure that underpins a huge swathe of the internet, says it has been tracking the increase. Its chief executive, Matthew Prince, says that “as more people work from home, peak traffic in impacted regions has increased, on average, approximately 10%. In Italy, which has imposed a nationwide quarantine, peak internet traffic is up 30%. Traffic patterns have also shifted so peak traffic is occurring earlier in the day in impacted regions.”