How Could the Internet Go Down?

But a shutdown of the internet would be impossible. Thieves may be able to worm holes into data centers and divert traffic, but full shutdown would entail disrupting every wired and wireless link on Earth.

Nonetheless, there’s an occasional outage of a server, or cables snapped by passing vessels, though these incidents are typically temporary and isolated.

‘It’s not centralised.
Because the Internet is distributed, and its servers are made up of cables, it would be very difficult to shut it down for the whole world. That would demand a series of cyber or physical attacks on dozens or hundreds of data centres and links to them – impossible in today’s digital world.

But parts of the Internet could be temporarily unavailable, either because one server was hacked or because an anchor caught onto a submerged cable and dragged it down.

Taking everything off the Internet would be worse, since that would do a massive economic damage across the globe. E-commerce businesses would lose a ton of revenue; SMS messages and cell phone coverage could be sever, depending on its severity.

This doesn’t have to be explained.
First the internet was something to look into, and not much was used by most of the population. But nowadays it has become part of our life wherein people use it to reach each other, do their job, shop online, and so on. If it were to suddenly shut down, we all could lose our lives.

Yet there’s no possibility that the entire internet will crash because it is so decentralised: it is composed of millions of computers, distributed around the globe, each holding copies of information that are replicated on multiple servers – which makes it almost impossible for the entire network to fail.

Yet internet access can get ruined by cyber attacks or natural hazards, so being ready and knowing how to respond when this happens is even more important. Even then, it will likely be less damaging than anyone thought possible.

It’s all around us.
Only if an asteroid, nuclear war or solar flare came along would the internet go down. It is a distributed network that has redundant links so that traffic can round obstacles; and its structure is ubiquitous throughout the world and it can be reconfigured in case parts become disabled.

The quickest and most probable way to destroy the internet would be a great concerted destruction of its network, either by cutting fibres carrying internet traffic across the world, or by hacking into buildings at junctions of networks – both of which would probably be very hard to do.

Cyberattacks can degrade web-based services but usually only to particular sites or networks. Governments have tried to block internet services in parts of the world by disrupting crucial services such as DNS.

It’s fragile.
An adversary could shut down the internet by hacking at least part of its infrastructure, and it would take coordinated strikes against both data centres where individual networks reside and submarine lines connecting them around the world. It has been difficult, but cables have been slashed both deliberately (political rallies) and by accident (docking anchors of ships); the most effective way to dismantle this network is to slice through its main fiber-optic lines – its egypt, its centrepiece, of sorts.

: Internet service can be lost but the network will not likely be downed. Therefore, the suggestion that it could suddenly go extinct seems more sci-fi than realistic. Rather, interruptions by cyber attacks or infrastructure malfunctions are more localised and short-lived – in other words, the resilience of the internet keeps it going to grow stronger than before!