What happens if the entire internet collapses?  

In many ways the internet has become the centrepiece of the modern human experience. It can be used to pay for your coffee, call your parents, provide directions, email your tutor that you’re ‘sick’, and about a million other things that you and everyone else do on the daily. It’s become so central to our lives that there have been continuous calls to scale back on internet usage and ‘go back to the good old days’ of ‘touching grass’, whatever that means. But the question is, what would happen if the entire internet collapsed?     

From an individual standpoint, it’s easy to believe that things would continue more or less as normal – you might think that you’d just have to use your physical debit card instead of Apple Pay and stop doomscrolling Instagram reels in lectures. However, the effects of the entire internet collapsing are significantly larger and much more sinister than a digital detox, potentially throwing the entire world into chaos.   

Websites [affected] included Coinbase, Duolingo, Fortnite, and Lloyds Bank

  A major internet outage that occurred last month highlighted these risks, affecting over one thousand companies and 6.5 million users. An issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS) –  a subsidiary of Amazon that provides cloud computing services worldwide – led to problems across a range of apps and websites including Coinbase, Duolingo, Fortnite, and Lloyds Bank. They  were first reported at 8am, when thousands of users across the UK discovered they were unable to access different website’s services, including critical functions such as paying for shopping or checking in for flights.   

One user, Marie Louise, told Sky News: “I deliver parcels for Amazon Flex and I haven’t been able to log in to my account all morning to be able to go to work today.”   

  AWS fixed the outage around four hours later, announcing that the error was caused by an issue with companies connecting to data services at the AWS data centres in North Virginia. The companies were temporarily unable to connect with the plant’s Domain Name System (DNS), leading to websites timing out and becoming unreachable to users.   

  Despite this issue being fixed within a relatively short time frame, it showcases the risk of concentrating a lot of the internet’s backbone in such small areas, which is the case with Google’s datacentre cluster in Iowa as well as the AWS hub in Virginia. The possibility of these clusters facing problems at the same time is the most likely doomsday scenario of the internet collapsing.  

 Moreover, the threat of falling victim to targeted cyberattacks presents itself as a constant concern

 The root cause of these problems could be anything ranging from adverse weather conditions such as snowstorms or heatwaves, damaging the physical infrastructure of the datacentres, to simple glitches that could have a snowball effect on the fragile programmes that have supported the internet for decades. There are even concerns about the recent use of AI to rewrite code for major providers, resulting in potential bugs being left unchecked to only be identified when the software crashes.   

  Moreover, the threat of falling victim to targeted cyberattacks presents itself as a constant concern. If they were coordinated alongside the other issues, it could lead to datacentres and DNS service providers going down across the globe, with many of the world’s cloud services – alongside the countless number of companies they support – ceasing to function altogether. This would result in billions of people worldwide being unable to access basic services such as banks, hospitals, and communication platforms, leading to unparalleled levels of fear and chaos. So, is there a plan to get the internet back up and running if it collapses?   

  According to Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at UCL, there is. He told the Guardian: “there is a non-virtual contingency plan, or at least there was. If the internet shuts down, the people who know how it works will meet up in a pub outside London and decide what to do.” However, he later said that he doesn’t “know if this is still the case”.  

  The main problem with any contingency plan is the fact that if the internet shuts down, it will have to be restarted, which has never been attempted before, thus making it hard to gauge the difficulty of such a task, or more pressingly, whether it is even possible.   

  So, the only reasonable thing you can do is to start preparing for a post-digital apocalypse. Make sure to keep a trolley’s worth of tinned goods from Tesco, some tinfoil hats to protect you from radiation, and a stack of The Boar’s print editions to keep your mind occupied as all hell breaks loose.