In order to properly grasp the story I'm about to tell, there's something you need to understand first.

Saudi Arabia is a country and a kingdom.

In an abstract yet very significant way, though,

Saudi Arabia is essentially a corporation.

There's a single company run by the Royal Family which employs the majority of the Saudi working population.

It's worth more than Apple, Google, and Amazon by a lot.

It's valued not in the millions or billions, but trillions of US dollars.

It doesn't just drive the Saudi economy, it basically is the Saudi economy.

Its ebbs and flows determine the welfare of the entire nation.

Not only that, since the Saudi and Iranian powers just about hold together the already tenuous

Middle East, it wouldn't be such a stretch to consider this company one of the few things saving a whole section of the world from structural collapse.

Suffice to say, the Saudi Aramco Oil Company is one of the most significant commercial entities in human history.

It's hard to imagine then what could happen if it were to come into any danger.

That would be crazy, right? Lai Lai Lai Lai Lai Lai Lai Lai, the Night of Power, is one of Islam's holiest Knights of the Year.

Much of the Muslim world shuts down during the Night of Power to celebrate the revelation of the Quran to their prophet Muhammad.

On August 15, 2012, as his tradition, over 50,000 Saudi Aramco employees stayed home for the holiday.

For a country with a mandatory state religion, you could imagine how empty these offices must have been.

You probably could have danced through their giant headquarters

in nothing but a kaffia and nobody would have noticed. So it was a quiet day. Perhaps, as they say, a little too quiet.

And then at the stroke of 11 and 8 minutes a.m. a different kind of quiet.

All at once, without any warning,

three quarters of the computers at the world's biggest company

...