Can the "first world" relate to internet disruption?

Our first chance to present HexHoot to a large audience was in the last week of April this year, at our university. We talked a lot about how deliberate internet shutdowns by different powerful organizations, or, internet disruptions due to certain mishaps would prevent people from using most of the popular internet services for communication.

Following the talk, I was given feedback that the people in the "first world" would not be able to relate to this problem, and hence, they would not take this project seriously. At the time, I did not have a good response to it; the best that I could come up with was "What happens if the undersea cables get destroyed due to an earthquake?". Recently, I came to know about a widespread internet disruption that happened in Canada in July 2022.

I read the details about this on Wikipedia. Around 25% of Canadian people lost access to internet connectivity, which means that over 12 million people could not access internet services. Now, even if one was not in this 25% if one's friend whom one is trying to communicate with is in that 25%, one would not be able to reach him or her. This means that a lot more people are effectively affected by this event alone. I have also read comments by some people affected by it stating that they could not communicate with people who were quite literally not very far from them geolocation-wise, or internal network-wise.

Interestingly, people are all good with spending billions on weapons for warfare, wherein the first course of action would be to disrupt any communication lines. But when it comes to establishing communication in an event wherein existing systems are disrupted, people are like "Nay, that is an unlikely event". The fact is that both natural and artificial factors could result in the disruption of a global communication system, and hence, setting up a local communication infrastructure is way more important.