How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?

Question

How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?

In: Technology

Answer 1

First we have to define what you mean by “the internet”.

The internet was born out of ARPANET – there is a false story that ARPANET was designed to be able to withstand a nuclear war by being able to reroute traffic is large parts of the network were destroyed/disrupted.

The nuclear war theory is false in that it was never an actual design goal of the original ARPANET, but as the network developed, the architecture, infrastructure and communication protocols have evolved in a way that it’s resistent to large parts of the actual physical network being wiped out by such an event.

However, the ‘internet’ as most people understand it relates to a software layer that sits on top of the actual internet – ie, the World Wide Web is what most people perceive as ‘the internet’ where people browse web sites, and how most phone apps operate (most modern phone apps use ‘REST’ protocols to communicate which is based on the HTTP protocol – the same thing browsers use to navigate websites).

Web sites require web servers and applications often require ‘back end servers’. In a modern setting, a *lot* of these servers are now hosted on ‘the cloud’. Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds are the two most popular cloud services, with AWS dominating most of that space.

Amazon have a complex ‘failover’ system in place to handle geographic outages across the globe, but ultimately they are a single provider that hosts most of the global services, so is still technically a single point of failure in theory. However, in reality, it would take something exceptional on a global scale to completely wipe out AWS.

There are also a number of supporting services that the internet relies on to operate such as DNS services, which do occasionally go down, but again they have failovers in place in order to minimise distruption.

So, in short, the internet is pretty robust and has been around since the early 70s. Could it ever disappear? Nothing’s impossible, but it would likely take a global catastrophic event for it to completely disappear. Individual countries have been ‘disconnected’ as a result of war or political repression in recent years, but the wider internet has continued on.