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In the Pittsburgh region, the Every1online project, led by the non-profit Meta Mesh, bridges communities with no-cost Internet service. Recognizing that digital literacy is a core component of digital inclusion, the authors worked with Meta Mesh to consider the digital literacy needs of community members and to be responsive to these needs through resources provided to individuals as their Internet connection is established. To build an understanding of these digital literacy needs, the research team surveyed librarians to discover the questions that patrons bring to the library. In this paper, we propose that libraries both provide essential social infrastructure and, as evidenced by this case study, serve as important intermediaries to critical infrastructure. We introduce the concept of a critical infrastructure intermediary, an organization or individual that helps people to find and use critical infrastructure and that helps to strengthen that infrastructure through a feedback loop. 

Shelter in place and lockdown orders during the COVID-19 pandemic affected a number of public and private services. In this paper, we study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication network outages in the United States. We use four publicly available data sources (FCC Outage Data, FCC complaints, Google Trends & Twitter) to study the frequency of network outages in the United States at the onset of the pandemic. Our analysis indicates an increase in network outages occurred during the immediate lockdown period in March 2020, and that the elevated rate of outages persisted for months, with effects continuing to be seen in Q4 of 2020.