Mr. Pashinyan urged a campaign of civil disobedience everywhere, and the tech workers translated the idea into the language of the internet. They compared their strategy to a blockchain, the widely diffused technology behind online currencies that aim to stay outside government control, or to a denial of service attack that crashes a website because too many users try to access it at once.

“We would go out for lunch and never come back, we just stayed on the street,” said Mr. Mkrtchyan.

The government helped with a series of ham-handed responses to the protests, which started in earnest on April 17. That is when Serzh Sargsyan, the president since 2008, tried to bypass term limits by becoming prime minister under a new Constitution that transferred most political power to that office — after having promised not to take the job.

As the protests grew, he warned darkly of a repeat of the events of March 1, 2008, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators after what many considered a tainted election win for Mr. Sargsyan, killing 10.

Like many of her peers, who had been traumatized by the bloodshed a decade ago, Ms. Petrosyan was enraged by the threat, making her eager to protest even more.

“From the first day that I went out onto the street I understood that something powerful was happening,” said Ms. Petrosyan. “We all understood that it is not just a question of planting a tree or keeping up a street, but knowing that our government is outdated and that we needed to change it.”

Her employer, PicsArt — where the average age of the 350 employees is 24, and about half are women — had always considered itself a good corporate citizen, subsidizing education for the disadvantaged, among other things. Management there, and at various companies big and small, looking around at all the empty desks, bowed to the inevitable.