This is a bizarrely overdramatic response to one provider being down for an hour, and I can't imagine why the author felt the need to include it, other than to further dramatize their own dramatization of a rather innocuous situation.
Next he's going to talk about keeping a horse in a stable out back in case the gas station runs out of fuel.
(Of course if internet goes down my phone has tons of spotify tracks downloaded onto it, so I'm sure I'll cope)
What about being able to work?
That's exactly why they included it. It's the internet equivalent of when journalists go out and interview random pedestrians to get their reactions/commentary to some event.
They want a soundbite that will stick in your mind after reading/viewing the news segment, regardless of how useful the commentary really is.
As long as most news is for-profit, and therefore their incentives lie primarily in maximizing engagement/ratings/ad revenue, they will continue to optimize for those things with different iterations of what is essentially clickbait.
Even here on the relatively intellectual HN, I regularly see articles posted that have very clickbaity and misleading titles.