Graphs make everything better. Even shoddily written articles.
The most immediate was that thousands of people saw sunlight (or moonlight in places where it was night-time, because time isn’t global, duh), and we could make some tired old joke about neckbeards and PC gaming and cheeto dust or something, but we’re better than that and aren’t going to fall back on old clichés when there are perfectly good new ones.
Surprisingly, however, with millions of computers unable to play Team Fortress 2 or the 90% of PC games out there which use Steam authentication, something remarkable happened. Free of having to render thousands and thousands of hats (remember what we said about new clichés? This one is still fairly new, so we’re in the business of running it into the ground. Don’t worry, in time it will be as grating as if we were to refer to fallacious baked goods), they were free to run the backdoor processing algorithms programmed in by Microsoft for the military or CIA or Mossad or something like that. This lead to a near-instantaneous jump in human technological progress and understanding.
Furthermore, scientists were free from the grip of designing new test chambers for Portal 2 and were able to find a cure for eighteen different cancers and make significant process on AIDS.
Sadly with the reactivation of the servers an hour later, most of this was forgotten as the world’s PC users retreated back to doing whatever it was beforehand. Probably playing with hats or something.
As a scientist at Black Mesa research facility I can confirm that we were able to work ten-fold during the outage. I heard a scientist over at the Lamba Complex even made a laser gun! He’s since traded it to a user named “XxsexyCieranxX” for 2 refined and a Tyrant’s Helm.