An apocalyptic thriller that audiences detested rejoins the conversation as a global catastrophe brings the plot to life

Roughly six hours ago, Earth was struck by a planet-wide Microsoft outage, impacting an array of major services including airlines, banks, hospitals, and emergency services.

The tech giant has since reported that the underlying issue for the outage — seemingly brought on in part from an operating system update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike — has been fixed, but it doesn’t seem like everything is quite back to normal yet.

Funnily enough, this happened back in December, too, except the impact was much worse, never got fixed, and was fictional.

Indeed, ever since the outage, X has been flooding with countless users who seemed desperate to have an original thought, not realizing that just about everyone was reminded that this was exactly how Leave the World Behind — the post-apocalyptic Netflix film written and directed by Sam Esmail and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama — kicked off its plot.

Fairly received by critics but hardly winning over audiences, Leave the World Behind is Esmail at his most optimistic, which says quite a bit about Esmail more than anything. The film’s powerhouse cast includes Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Myha’la, and centers on a pair of families as the world descends into apocalyptic chaos after a country-wide cyberattack causes planes to fall out of the sky and Teslas to pile up the roads. As everyone tries to make sense of this mysterious enemy (or, perhaps, the lack thereof), Esmail delves into some deceptively thoughtful spectacle, ruminating on who we become when confronted with faceless disaster, and how we choose to navigate it.

Naturally, a real-life moment wherein airplanes can’t fly, banks can’t properly function, and Starbucks can’t give people their daily doses of caffeine has prompted casual Netflix viewers to panic about the jarring reality of life imitating art. With any luck, this real-life happenstance won’t mirror its fictional counterpart, but for the moment, that remains to be seen.

While we wait with bated breath to see how this unexpected event plays out, rest assured that Leave the World Behind is available to stream on Netflix.