How fragile is the internet? Could it ever dissappear?
In: Technology
It’s fragility comes in that it requires electricity. Power goes down, internet goes down. That’s the more likely scenario.
If you are thinking in the context of the Crowdstrike outage and not just details of networking technology, there are several points of concentrated risk. In addition to the networking points mentioned already: DNS. BGB. major operating systems and near ubiqutous third-party applications (ie Crowdstrike) all come to mind. Each could have an outsized impact and cause serious disruptions to usage of the internet in the modern sense.
Lots of resiliancies/resources are poured into things like this (usually), so fragile isn’t necessarily the right word, but they are all narrower points of failure than most people think about. Much of what modern life depends on involves stacks of these kinds of risk dependencies.
Well, it’s difficult to say. When you start doing networking stuff you’re actually amazed that any of it works at all. That said, a lot of work by a lot of people goes into maintaining it. So a population crash could mess it up. Wars are another possibility. A massive amount of traffic is transported by undersea cables which can be cut which would put countries or continents out of commission. But just going along as we are now? It’s pretty resilient, really. There’s a lot of money and resources dedicated to it and income streams relying on it.
There are certain functions that make the Internet work. If one of them was broken or attacked, then yes we could have no Internet for a time. Think of how your website address is converted to an IP address. If this process were to stop a lot of people would not be able to use the Internet or for example their banking app.
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.
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.
Not very fragile. It’s not one thing, it is lots of computers working together. To make the internet disappear you’d have to destroy every computer on the planet.
The modern internet is a network and a social platform.
As a network the internet is robust enough that the likelihood hood it dissappearing is minimal. If the physical network no longer works society would likely have bigger issues.
As a social platform, what people think of the internet can dissappear and has done so in the past. Early internet was used to share files between researchers. There was no websites. This is long gone. Early 2000s internet was AIM, flash games and funky dial up sounds. This is also gone. While the network stays in place how people use and interact with the internet changes overtime and this means some parts of it disappears. For a lot of people Facebook was the internet in the early 2010s. No few people use Facebook socially. The same could happen to Twitter, Instagram, Discord or any other service.
Wow!! Thank you guys for the thoughtful comments!
It could, but not likely.
The Internet is a concept not really a thing. As long as we have energy we have Internet or something similar
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