The Night Colombia Went Quiet

Yesterday the ground moved in Colombia, and my family went quiet.

Not quiet the way people are quiet when they're busy. Quiet the way a phone is quiet when the message under your thumb says delivered to no one. The family group chat — the one that never sleeps, the one with the voice notes and the blessings and the photos of somebody's lunch — just stopped. I sat in another country watching a single grey check mark, writing ¿están bien? into a hole.

There's a line on our home page: The network died. Your tribe didn't. I wrote it about festivals. Yesterday it stopped being about festivals.

What actually happens to a network in an earthquake

A cell tower looks solid, but it's really three fragile things in a coat: power, backhaul, and capacity.

• Power. Towers ride the electrical grid. When the grid goes down, they fall back to batteries and generators — hours of life, not days, and nobody can refuel a generator during aftershocks.
• Backhaul. Every tower is only as alive as the fiber or microwave link behind it. Shaking that snaps a buried cable silences every tower downstream of it, even the ones still standing.
• Capacity. And the towers that survive meet the worst crowd of their lives: an entire city pressing call at the same minute. A network built for a Tuesday gets a Tuesday where everyone is afraid.

So the blackout isn't one failure. It's a cascade — and it lands at the exact moment the only thing anyone wants from a phone is one sentence: I'm okay.

A path that does not need a tower

The internet may fail while nearby phones still have power and working Bluetooth radios. FindTribe can use those radios as a second local path.

Participating phones relay an encrypted message one Bluetooth link at a time. The phones in the middle cannot read it. If they form a continuous route to your people, I'm okay gets another chance to reach someone waiting for it.

That gives a message another chance in a festival crowd or wider outage. Whether the route reaches your people depends on distance, movement, device power, radio conditions and the participating phones nearby.

What the Bluetooth path needs

Bluetooth gives a message another way through, with a few practical requirements:

• The Bluetooth mesh is not satellite. A message needs a continuous route through participating phones within radio reach. If no route exists, the message waits.
• SOS alerts the trusted people you selected over internet and Bluetooth at the same time. It does not contact emergency services. If you can reach rescue services, call them.
• The route depends on the phones, permissions, power, distance, and movement available at that moment.

Farther than the phone chain

That dependence on nearby phones is why phase 1 adds direct LoRa links between compatible MeshCore pods. Phase 2 adds dedicated repeaters, designed to carry short encrypted updates across cities and states without requiring a dense chain of phones between every family member.

Before the next one

Earthquakes don't send invitations. Everything that made yesterday survivable had to exist the day before. The list is short:

• Put FindTribe on the phones of the people you love — yours, your parents', the cousins who live where the ground moves. The encryption between you is set up the day you connect, while there's still signal.
• Make a family tribe. Not just the festival crew — the people you'd be writing to at 3 a.m. with one grey check mark.
• Drop a meet point. Agree on where everyone walks if the phones ever go truly dark. A meet point works offline; so does the compass that leads to it.
• Keep Bluetooth on. The local mesh cannot work if the radio is disabled.

My family came back online in pieces — one aunt, then a cousin, then everyone at once, the chat flooding like a river finding its bed. We were lucky. Luck is not a plan.

We're building so one lost signal does not have to be the only chance to reach each other.

—Felipe · Founder