A small glitch in a data center in Virginia, United States, this week reminded us of an uncomfortable truth: the impossible is not as impossible as we think. The internet, which has been the backbone of modern life for decades, actually relies on a network of old software and physical infrastructure that is often on the verge of overload. This has led many experts to ask themselves, what would it take for the internet to shut down completely?
Imagine the morning after a day when the internet is down. At first you might think you’d feel free, but you’d soon realize you didn’t know what to do. You could only buy all your groceries with cash. You could call work from your landline, if it still worked. After that, you’d probably head out somewhere, provided you still remember how to navigate without a GPS.
A small glitch in a data center in Virginia, United States, this week reminded us of an unpleasant truth: the impossible is not as impossible as we think. The internet, which has been the backbone of modern life for decades, actually relies on a network of old software and physical infrastructure that is often on the verge of overload. This has led many experts to ask themselves, what would it take for the internet to shut down completely? According to an analysis by The Guardian, a combination of bad luck and a few targeted attacks is enough. Extreme weather can destroy several important data centers. A single line of code written by artificial intelligence could trigger a chain of flaws in the systems of Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Or perhaps an armed group – or an intelligence service – could cut several underwater cables.
These would be scary scenarios, but not fatal. The real catastrophe, what internet experts call “The Big One,” would come from a sudden, avalanche-like error in the old network protocols, the ones that govern how one device finds another on the internet.
WHEN A TORNADO CAN STOP GOOGLE
Such a “big one” could start, for example, when a tornado passes over the city of Council Bluffs, Iowa, destroying a Google data center complex. This area, called us-central1, is essential for Google Cloud services, YouTube, and Gmail. In 2019, a brief outage there temporarily brought down those services in the US and Europe.
Within minutes, YouTube cooking videos stop, emails don’t open, employees start communicating face-to-face, and US government officials report slowdowns in public services. And yet, according to experts, the internet would still technically be “alive.” “If we have two devices connected with a router between them, the internet exists,” says Michał “Rysiek” Woźniak, a specialist in the DNS system, the mechanism that allows one internet address to find another. But as Steven Murdoch, professor of computer science at University College London, explains, the internet is increasingly concentrated in a few hands.
“This is how the digital services economy works, it’s cheaper and more convenient to operate everything in the same place,” he said.
WHEN AUTOMATION BECOME THE ENEMY
Now imagine that a heat wave in Virginia paralyzes the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers, an area known as “datacenter alley,” the heart of many of the world’s cloud services. Meanwhile, a cyberattack hits a data center in Frankfurt or London. Networks try to divert traffic to secondary centers, but like a traffic jam in Los Angeles, everything slows to a crawl.
In this mess, a hidden ‘bug’ in AWS’s automated systems, written months ago by artificial intelligence, after hundreds of employees were laid off, is suddenly activated. The infrastructure begins to collapse. Services like Signal, Slack, Netflix and Lloyd’s Bank stop working. Roomba robot vacuums go silent, “smart” mattresses go crazy and smart locks freeze. If Amazon and Google stop, the internet as we know it will no longer exist. The three giants, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, control over 60% of the global cloud services market, and it is almost impossible to calculate how many businesses and applications depend on them.
“At the most basic level, the internet still works,” says infrastructure expert Doug Madory. “But practically, nothing we’re used to would work, because everything is based on these giant data centers.”
THE MYTHOLOGY OF UNDERWATER CABLES
Many think the biggest risk is damage to undersea cables. But according to Madory, this is more a topic for Washington think tanks than a real threat. “Undersea cables break all the time,” he explains. “The UN estimates that there are 150 to 200 faults every year. It would take a lot of them to be damaged at once for communication to really stop.”
According to him, the only scenario that could paralyze the global internet would be an attack on the DNS system, the internet’s “address book.” Companies like Verisign, which manages every website ending in “.com” or “.net,” are vital to the functioning of the network.
“If something were to happen to Verisign.com, it would disappear from the network. They have every financial reason to prevent that,” Madory adds. If such an event were to occur, banks, hospitals, financial services, and communication platforms would all be wiped out at once. All that would remain would be a few isolated government structures and a few independent, self-hosted blogs, or decentralized networks like Mastodon.
CAN WE RESTART THE INTERNET?
Professor Murdoch mentions another rare risk, a flaw in BIND, the software that powers the DNS system. In 1998, a group of hackers from Massachusetts warned the US Congress that a vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which routes traffic across the internet, could “bring the internet down in 30 minutes”. Madory, however, is reassuring, explaining that “the protocol is very resilient. If it wasn’t, it would have been down long ago. But, yes, if the internet were ever to go down completely, nobody knows for sure how we would get it back up again”.
In the UK, there used to be a back-up plan, not a virtual one. In the event that the internet went down, experts who knew the ins and outs of it would meet in a pub outside London to decide what to do next. “I don’t know if that plan still exists,” Murdoch says with a smile. “It’s been many years and no one ever told me which pub it was.”
