How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
In general it’s pretty resilient. “The internet” is really just all do the computers in the world connected to each other, but a lot of what you think of as the internet exists in a data center ran by either Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Oracle. For the most part the buildings are built to withstand a lower level natural disaster. If they lose power, they have backup generators. If an earthquake opened up and the building fell into the center of the earth, most of the data that has already been replicated to another building in another city would start back up and stay running, albeit maybe at a slower speed.
However, we saw on Friday how a software bug can affect the internet in a way that even a natural disaster can’t touch. Microsoft hosts about 25% of the world’s web traffic and Windows is on about 70% of all computers around the world. Crowdstrike, a security company that markets to enterprise businesses, pushed out a security update that had a bug that unintentionally tanked any Windows computer that used Crowdstrike and was able to receive that update. As a result millions of windows computers went down, many websites and applications hosted in a Microsoft data center went offline and airlines, banks, hospitals, grocery stores that are reliant on accessing the internet to handle their business operations went down.
It was fixed in about a day, but imagine if this was performed by a bad group of people, strategically and intentionally over the course of a few months.
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