How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
While it’s entirely possible for it to be destroyed, it would take a force beyond human reckoning to do so. Moreover, humanity in its current state would not willingly do so, as that would lead to a radical change of lifestyle on a near-global scale
Everything is as strong as its weakest link. So given our existence on this ball of rock is finite, so is the internet as we know it today.
There’s a lot of backups and failovers for the internet to make sure it stays online, but even those can fail.
Not fragile at all because it a collection of many many segments. If google goes down you can use a chinese search engine etc etc. As for dissapearing, It is possible but only if it transforms into something better.
Not so much fragile as fragmented and those parts could and are cut off at times.
You could cut off parts of the Internet from each other and be stuck with just the sites hosted in your country/region.
Bringing down the whole network is pretty much impossible as the system is decentralized, but cut a few cables and the whole country was just isolated from the rest of the internet.
As always, there’s an xkcd comic about it: [https://xkcd.com/2347/](https://xkcd.com/2347/)
That’s not to say that the internet isn’t resilient. But there are certain keystone elements of it that need regular maintenance to keep everything else going. If someone drops the ball on one of them, things can come to a screeching halt until an effort is made to get it back up and running.
“The internet” is a set of rules describing how computers can communicate with each other. The only way to make it disappear would be to destroy every connection between computers in different places.
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.
“the Internet” doesnt truely exist. What we think of as the internet is millions of devices networked together using specific protocals.
Its possible to destroy any part of it easily, a server here, a network connection there, but the only way to destroy the internet as a whole would be to destroy every server in the network, and even then it would be re-built quickly.
So long as humanity can power a network, the internet will not dissappear. But if anything happens humanity, or the very fragile rock we live on, the internet will die with us
If everyone who maintains it stopped doing so, it would probably collapse within a month. But that’s not really going to happen.
The whole point of the internet is redundancy. Darpa developed packet-switched networks specifically so communications between cities could be maintained in the event of nuclear war.
It does require a lot of maintenance to keep the hardware running smoothly, but the only way it’s going to disappear is if there’s a global catastrophe that kills most people.
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