How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
The Internet is very resilient and decentralized, by design. At their most basic, the Internet protocols provide ways to get data from point A to point B, even when the network is constantly changing with new paths coming online or failing all the time.
So it’s easy to imagine major disruptions, or even regional outages. But it’s hard to imagine a truly global failure, even temporarily. It would probably take either a world war or apocalyptic event to stop the Internet as a whole.
There are a few centralized points that are more vulnerable:
* The domain name system (DNS) is what resolves a human-readable name like `google.com` to an IP address. It has a central hierarchy. The root name servers tell you where to find `.com`, and the com name servers tell you where to find Google. They run many copies of the root name servers around the world, but in theory someone with the right access could maybe sabotage or destroy them all. It would be a big mess for a while, but then the world would pick someone to run new root DNS servers.
* The Internet runs on electricity, and power grids are centrally run because they must exactly match supply + demand and frequency at every instant. So it’s easy to imagine a grid failure in the Eastern US taking out the Internet there. But the Internet elsewhere would continue running.
* A truly global power grid failure could be caused by a huge solar flare, like the Carrington Event of 1859. That geomagnetic storm caused widespread disruption to telegraph wires, sparking fires and destroying equipment. A similar event today could damage power stations and transformers globally. It might also damage satellites and destroy the repeaters inside long distance Internet cables.
* Most companies run their services from data centers run by a handful of companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. While they have hundreds of data centers around the world, it’s theoretically possible to destroy them. Similarly, the Internet backbone has physical locations called peering exchanges where lots of ISPs get together to connect their equipment. But it would require something like ICBMs / nuclear war to destroy them all. Even in Ukraine under conditions of war, the Internet still works.
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