LONDON — The president's address to a distraught nation in the midst of a surprise military coup was being interrupted, not by gunshots or protestors, but an incoming call.

On Saturday at half-past-midnight, Nuh Yilmaz, press officer for Turkey's national intelligence agency, called CNN Türk anchor Hande Firat on her mobile phone. He didn't realize that he was interrupting a FaceTime call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Moreover, he didn't know that the phone was being held up to a CNN studio camera in Ankara and broadcast around the world.

Firat's index finger could be seen awkwardly and repeatedly pressing her iPhone's menu button in the hope that Yilmaz's name would disappear from the screen.

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In the background, the president’s voice carried on, speaking from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Turkish resort town of Marmaris. Finally, flustered and confused, Firat jabbed her middle finger at the ‘end call’ button, sending the intelligence agency to voicemail.

The president’s address to his distraught nation in the midst of a surprise military coup could now continue without interruption.

Erdogan’s FaceTime call was bizarre, but revealing. It laid bare the calculus of a president whose support is heavily built on the ubiquity of his own face. The giant presidential portraits that have sprouted up on the country’s major boulevards in the last two years are a testament to this.

And now, sequestered in a dull, white room with no camera crews on hand, he desperately needed a way to show his face. So his staff pulled out an iPhone and opened FaceTime.

About three hours earlier, shortly after the first tanks rolled into Istanbul and Ankara, there was a moment when it seemed that everyone knew what was coming.

This is your first coup...Don't be worried

Military coups were a common feature in the Turkish experience of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Late Friday night into early Saturday morning, suburban parents called their children who were working or studying in the city to walk them through the process.

Dogan, a 28-year-old engineer in Istanbul, told Mashable in an interview that his mother told him and his girlfriend not to panic.

“This is your first coup,” Dogan's mother told them. “We have been through many. So I just wanted to say, don’t be worried, ok?”

Dogan requested that his last name be withheld due to the volatile political situation.

Melis, a 26-year-old Turk living in New England, was terrified when she phoned home.

Her parents reassured her by saying they already know the drill, she told Mashable. She also requested her last name be withheld for fear of repercussions for her family in Turkey.

Activating VPNs

As families were coping with the unrest, reporters and activists were switching their conversations over to WhatsApp and activating VPNs.

People chant slogans as they gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Image: Emrah Gurel/AP

This, too, was a strategy based on experience. Erdogan once described social media as a “knife in the hand of a murderer,” and common communications apps like Facebook Messenger and Twitter are routinely blocked by court order in Turkey at the slightest disturbance to national security.

With such disturbances becoming more frequent and extreme, authorities have more recently done away with court orders altogether, choosing to “throttle” social media services by slowing them down unilaterally.

This was particularly handy in last night’s attempted coup, when court orders were in danger of becoming irrelevant. At 10:50 p.m., Dyn, an internet performance tracking service, reported that the throttling had begun. And then all assumptions were overturned.

The throttling subsided, albeit inconsistently. Binali Yildirim, Turkey’s prime minister and Erdogan’s loyal ally, was tweeting furiously. The president was retweeting from his account, and he was also composing Facebook posts.

When the president appeared on FaceTime, it became necessary for other politicians to also appear on FaceTime. Abdullah Gül, a former president, was interviewed by CNN Türk on a 5-inch screen via FaceTime.

Lawmakers scurrying around the parliament building in Ankara were calling into CNN Türk via FaceTime, with explosions being heard in the background.

It was a phenomenon that echoed the American CNN’s peculiar obsession with ‘holograms’ for one month during the 2008 presidential election, but this time fueled by Turkey's presidential personality cult and the abundance of unlimited 3G internet plans.

Erdogan borrowed his enemy's tactics

Erdogan’s own aides, like the journalists and activists they so revile, were switching their conversations over to WhatsApp and reaching out to as much of the President’s conservative base as they could.

At around two o’clock in the morning, Istanbul’s thousands of minarets came to life. Imams issued calls on the loudspeaker for citizens to get out of their homes and show the military that they support their president.

The calls were streamed and tweeted and the tides suddenly shifted. Outside, where soldiers were previously disarming police officers, police officers were now arresting soldiers.

Pro-coup protesters were overwhelmed by pro-government protesters under the sonic boom of fighter jets zooming out of the urban airspace.

The soldiers that instigated the coup had followed an old playbook, seizing media offices, shutting down bridges and airports, and trying to occupy physical territory.

The President drew instead from the methods of the young, educated, urban elites who so frequently oppose him by focusing on a more virtual Turkey.

With his back to the wall in Marmaris, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who condemned social media activists as knife-wielding murderers, decided to pick up the knife.