It is the morning after the internet went offline and, as much as you would like to think you would be delighted, you are likely to be wondering what to do.
You could buy groceries with a chequebook, if you have one. Call into work with the landline – if yours is still connected. After that, you could drive to the shop, as long as you still know how to navigate without 5G.
A glitch at a datacentre in the US state of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The internet may have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure, leading some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.
The answer could be as simple as some acute bad luck, a few targeted attacks, or both. Extreme weather takes out a few key datacentres. A line of AI-written code deep in a major provider – such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft – is triggered unexpectedly and causes a cascading software crash. An armed group or intelligence agency snips a couple of undersea cables.
These would be bad. But the real doomsday event, the kind that the world’s few internet experts still worry about in private Slack groups, is slightly different – a sudden, snowballing error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connection, or the address books that allow one machine to locate another.
We’ll call it “the big one” and if it were to happen then at the very least, you would need your chequebook.
The big one could start when a summertime tornado cruises through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, laying waste to a low-slung cluster of datacentres that are an integral part of Google’s offering.
This area, called us-central1, is a Google datacentre cluster, critical to its Cloud Platform as well as YouTube and Gmail – a 2019 outage here downed these services across the US and Europe.
Dinners burn as YouTube cooking videos sputter to a halt. Workers across the world furiously refresh their suddenly inaccessible emails, then resign themselves to interacting in person. Senior US officials notice some government services have slowed, before returning to planning a new blitz over Signal.
All this is inconvenient, but nowhere near the end of the internet. “Technically, if we have two networked devices and a router between them, the internet is running,” says Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, who works in DNS, the system involved in this week’s outage.
But there is “absolutely a lot of concentration happening on the internet”, says Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London. “This happens with economics. It’s just cheaper to run all things in the same place.”
But what if then a heatwave in the eastern US takes out US East-1, part of a Virginia complex that hosts “datacenter alley”, a key hub for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the focus of this week’s outage…
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