I've noticed lately that nearly all systems screw up and happily avoid taking any responsibility for it. Car rental, banks of any kind, ticket booking, all sorts of services, SaaS, etc., started regularly going numb and stopped apologizing for poor or negative performance despite obvious losses caused to their clients. I started, accordingly, questioning various scenarios, inclusively the "network apocalypse".
What if internet as the nervous system connecting all the organs and thoughts and everything into one big WWW falls and we find ourselves in the basic settings or In the "Planet of apes" movie setup in terms of technologies?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/26/internet-infrastructure-fragile-system-holding-modern-world-together
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It was designed to be very redundant, if memory serves. Like in a nuclear war, if node A gets knocked out, node B takes over. It’s been a long time since I read up on this, so forgive my poor recollection.
We, humans, are very talented creatures in the destruction aspect of our nature. I find localization and isolation scenario possible, unfortunately. WWW can get damaged or at least challenged and stay conditionally world wide, but rather become regional, concentrated around powerful hubs with extremely good security and economic confidence. Look at China: internet isolation is huge except for the areas where it is beneficial for Chinese economy and geopolitics.
The Amazon outage exposed a weakness in the system. The race is on between big tech companies to get their individual data centers to be able to operate independently in case of an emergency. It will cost a lot of money but not as much if their competitors do it first, because independent operation is something their customers are going to consider a necessity.
My assumption is that if Republicans get desperate, they will force communications systems to go down (internet, mobile phones, etc.) to cause chaos. That would be one of my triggers to refuse to go back to work.
The internet goes offline all the time. Just like roads corrode if not maintained and buildings do the same, the internet needs constant repair to function.Â
It’s a much shorter lived infrastructure though. A disused bridge can still be safe after 10 years, but a lot of compute hardware is lucky just to reach 10 years of operation, nevermind doing so without administrative support.
So, yea, the world is supported by an internet of toothpicks.
DNS and BGP are both huge weaknesses in the internet that will continue breaking until we completely redesign them.
Two to three days with zero internet, the world would plunge into chaos.