What would happen if one day the internet “fell”? What are the chances of it happening?

Seven in the morning, Monday. Breakfast time and news on the Internet. Only on this day … there is no network. “Connection failed” over and over again. Phone calls to awake friends. They have the same problem. The first impulse, almost automation, is the google typing of the question “What about the Internet?”. The second is the search for information on news sites and social media. Obviously, without the Internet, none of this is possible. And now; The only information can come from the traditional media. And these, however, have been largely “blocked”, due to problems in telecommunications. The only thing that is certain is that the problem has manifested simultaneously all over the planet. If it lasts for a few hours, it will be the first topic in the nightly news bulletins around the world. But if it lasts for days or weeks, then things are “darkening”: everything from tele-education to work and water supply to supermarkets are malfunctioning or “frozen”. Banks, air transport, sea transport (yes, and the oil tanker that will end up in the neighborhood gas station), warehouses and logistics companies, thanks to which the products reach the shelves of supermarkets, even the traffic lights will suddenly stop to function normally.

Some have called “Internet Discovery” such a scenario of prolonged interruption of Internet access. Is it really possible to happen? And what would it mean in practice? According to Mark Graham, professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute, if the Internet “fell”, we would witness an almost imminent global economic collapse. This is because the Internet is the nervous system of modern globalization, necessary even for the tomato grower or the fisherman (who have their products outside the narrow local market), who without it will probably have difficulty selling their production, get paid for her and distribute it. “And there are two things that are guaranteed to wreak havoc on the modern economy: the inability to distribute food and the inability to access money and the banking system.” More sparing in words, but just as expressive, Daniel Pargman, of the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology, has stated that if there was a prolonged “blackout” on the Internet to such an extent, the impact would be “unimaginable”.

The APE-MPE contacted five researchers, postdoctoral, doctoral and doctoral candidates of the Data and Web Science Laboratory (Datalab) of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, asking for answers to questions about how likely it would be if a … Monday Ί now … there.

Is it really possible that what has sometimes been called the “Discovery of the Internet” will happen?

The assessment that the “Discovery of the Internet”, ie a large-scale interruption of Internet access, is a very rare, but not impossible phenomenon to occur, are expressed to the APE-MPE the doctoral candidate Sofia Yfantidou and the postdoctoral doctor D Pavlos Serbezis. As they point out, cyber attacks and natural disasters can only cause minor disruptions to the Internet, such as reduced access speeds. This is because the Internet (as well as electricity, transport, etc.) is designed to be resilient to problems. For example, if a line or equipment is damaged, there are alternative routes.

However, “recently, researchers at Irvine University in California have identified a factor that has not been taken into account in the design of the Internet: solar storms. The solar storm is about “explosions” of solar material, which while not dangerous to humans, can be destructive to long cables, which are the backbone of Internet infrastructure. The greatest solar storms occurred before the advent of the Internet, in 1859 and 1921, creating significant problems in the telecommunications network of the time, the telegraph! The probability of their occurrence ranges from 1.6% to 12% per decade. Although the power grid is designed to calculate the probability of solar storms, Internet design does not seem to take this risk into account. “For example, the connectivity of Europe and America through submarine cables is predicted to be more affected due to their long length.”

Have there been any incidents in which the Internet has “fallen” for large population groups?

According to Dr. Serbezis and PhD candidate George Vlachava, “there are frequent cases in which part of the Internet” falls “due to failures in network infrastructure (eg fiber optics, routers), errors in protocol settings – a recent example is typical. of Facebook- cyberattacks or censorship tactics. Indicatively, they note, every year there are more than 3000 large-scale accidents or attacks, related to the BGP protocol (s.s. cross-routing protocol) and more than 10 million small or large DDoS attacks (s.s. distributed denial of service attack) .

The extent of most incidents is – as they say – limited, however there are several cases that affected large population groups, such as the DDoS attack on the company “DNS Dyn” in 2016, which affected access to many services (Netflix, PayPal, Visa, Amazon , etc.) for almost a day or a misconfiguration of the BGP protocol in 2017, which cut off the whole of Japan from the Internet for several minutes.

The financial cost of such incidents is huge (millions of dollars per hour for large companies): in 2018 companies “lost” a total of 60 million operating hours due to extensive Internet outages. However, according to Mr. Serbezi and Mr. Vlahava, the case of censorship is also important, where governments cut off access to websites or the entire Internet to the populations of their states (s.s. the so-called “kill switch”, lowering the switch ). Examples of such practices are the total denial of access to Indonesia in 2019 for 19 days and the ban on access to sites such as Wikipedia and Twitter in Turkey for months or even years.

What would happen if one day we woke up and the Internet had “fallen”?

Education, work, telecommunications, electricity and grids, air transport and maritime transport, logistics, traffic lights, all now “click” to a greater or lesser degree on the Internet, while in the future their dependence will increase and the same will happen to all home appliances in the context of the Internet of Things. What would happen if one day we woke up and the Internet had “fallen”? As Datalab postdoctoral researcher Dr. Vassilios Psomiadis points out to APE-MPE, the Internet now connects more than 12.3 billion devices worldwide, with forecasts for 2025 exceeding 27 billion devices.

“The recent – on October 4, 2021 – seven-hour suspension of access to the popular online social networking platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, due to a technical error by the provider itself, highlighted the global and collective requirement for uninterrupted access to the Internet. and in its services. In addition to personal communication and entertainment, these platforms are widely used for business purposes (mainly advertising, eg Facebook has more than $ 80 billion in revenue annually from this source). At the same time, in many developing countries, in Africa and Asia, Facebook, through the “Free Basics” program, is a way to access basic online services free of charge. “Using indicators from the World Bank, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Eurostat and the US Census Bureau, the cost of the downturn to the global economy has exceeded $ 1.1 billion.” Psomiadis.

Is there a way to shield businesses, states and individuals from a blackout on the Internet?

As Datalab PhD candidate Dimitra Karanatsiou points out in APE-MPE, everyday users should think about the consequences of such an event by gaining knowledge and changing their attitude towards the use of the Internet. “For example, limiting Internet penetration to everyday activities (work, entertainment, communication, etc.) and egocentric evaluation of the positive and negative consequences in advance, can shield us from a blackout and protect us from possible panic, which this will cause. Businesses that rely more or less on the Internet, as well as countries with similar e-government services, must take steps to prevent such an event, such as securing back-up lines on the Internet. Internet (network redundancy) and the reduction of dependence on a single service provider (eg web hosting or cloud computing), so that in case of blackout of the line or the provider, there are alternatives, so as not to stop their activity. In addition, they can mitigate the harmful effects of total blackout by maintaining strict safety protocols and reliable service-level agreements (SLAs) with providers that include legally binding timetables for dealing with a problem or financial sanctions for service providers in cases of damage “he concludes.

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