"Shambhala", Alex Irvine

NT F&SF (Fantasy & Science Fiction) March 2006 - science fiction
Shambhala is a commercial virtual world, where people move to escape their physical bodies. But now Shambhala is crashing. Mike Chancey and various professional Nerds somewhere on earth, see computer status indicators are going yellow and red and worry about the legal ramifications. Shannon DeWalt, who is in the virt or virtual world, searches for Charon, who is knowledgeable, and sees the apocalypse from the inside.

I like the idea of and many of the details of this story, but the characters didn’t really draw me in.