How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
A lot of people here are only thinking of the physical characteristics of “the internet” and how difficult it would be to disrupt.
For instance, you would not need an apocalyptic nuclear war destroying the entirety of the network in order to disrupt internet usage for most or all users. A few well placed explosives in datacenters hosting major DNS servers would do the trick.
A sophisticated piece of malware targeting BGP (Border gateway protocol) or ARP (Address resolution protocol) on data center edge routers would absolutely bring the entire world to its knees, let alone a 0 day exploit for those services that could potentially affect all routers.
Both of the examples i provided are problems that could be resolved and rebuilt from in time, but then again, total destruction of the network would also technically be repairable if there are still people to do it. Where an end user is concerned, yes, the internet is fragile, but there is a literal army of men and women behind the scenes making sure it keeps working every day.
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