Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together | Internet

It’s the morning after the Internet went offline, and while you’d like to think you’d be thrilled, you’re probably wondering what to do.

You can do your shopping with a checkbook, if you have one. Call work from the landline – if yours is still connected. After that, you can drive to the store, as long as you know how to navigate without 5G.

A problem this week at a data center in the US state of Virginia reminded us that the improbable is not impossible. The Internet may have become an irreplaceable pillar of modern life, but it’s also a network 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 acute bad luck, a few targeted attacks, or both. Extreme weather destroys some key data centers. A line of code written by AI within a major vendor – such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft – is triggered unexpectedly and causes a cascading software crash. An armed group or intelligence agency cuts a some submarine cables.

That would be bad. But the real apocalyptic event, the one that the few Internet experts in private Slack groups still worry about, is slightly different — a sudden, snowballing error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underpin the entire Internet. Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connections or the address books that allow one machine to locate another.

We’ll call it “the big one” and if it were to happen, you’ll at least need your checkbook.

The big one could begin when a summer tornado tore through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, destroying a group of low-slung data centers that are an integral part of Google’s offering.

This zone, called us-central1, is a cluster of Google data centers, essential to its cloud platform as well as YouTube and Gmail – an outage in 2019 disrupted these services in the United States and Europe.

Dinners burn while YouTube cooking videos grind to a halt. Workers around the world furiously refresh their suddenly inaccessible emails, then resign themselves to interacting in person. Senior US officials notice that some government services have slowed down, before starting to plan a new blitz on Signal.

All of this is inconvenient, but we are far from the end of the Internet. “Technically, if we have two networked devices and a router between them, the Internet works,” says Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, who works in DNS, the system involved in this week’s outage.

But there is “absolutely a lot of focus on the Internet,” says Steven Murdoch, professor of computer science at University College London. “It happens with the economy. It’s just cheaper to run everything in one place.”

But what would happen if a heat wave in the eastern United States destroyed US East-1, part of a Virginia complex that hosts a “data center alley,” a key hub for Amazon Web Services (AWS), at the center of this week’s outage — among a handful of its neighbors? Meanwhile, a cyberattack hits a major European cluster, for example in Frankfurt or London. In the process, networks redirect traffic to secondary hubs, less-used data centers, which, like frontage roads in Los Angeles traffic, quickly become unusable.

Or, moving away from the disaster movie to talk about the perils of automation, the increased traffic could trigger a bug in AWS’s internal infrastructure that was rewritten by artificial intelligence months ago — perhaps a bug that went unnoticed after hundreds of AWS employees were laid off this summer as part of the company’s biggest push toward automation. Overwhelmed by unknown requests, AWS begins to plummet.

The signal decreases. The same goes for Slack, Netflix and Lloyd’s Bank. Roomba vacuums become silent. Smart mattresses are becoming unwanted and smart locks are malfunctioning.

With Amazon and Google gone, the Internet would seem largely unknown. AWS, Microsoft and Google together account for more than 60% of the global cloud services market – and it’s almost impossible to estimate how many services rely on them.

“But the Internet, at its most rudimentary, still works,” says Doug Madory, an Internet infrastructure expert who studies disruptions. “You just can’t do everything you’re used to on the Internet because it’s all published from these data centers. »

You might think the biggest threat is an attack on an undersea cable. This excites Washington think tanks, but yields no other concrete results. Undersea cables break regularly, Madory says – in fact, the UN estimates there are between 150 and 200 breaches a year.

“You’d really have to remove quite a few of them to affect communication. I think the submarine cable industry would tell you: Man, we do this all the time.”

Then, a group of anonymous hackers launches an attack on a DNS service provider – one of the Internet’s telephone directories. Verisign, for example, manages all online sites that end with a certain “.com” or “.net”. Ultranet, another, supports “.biz” and “.us”.

Madory says it’s extremely unlikely that any of them could ever be eliminated. “If something were to happen to Verisign, .com would disappear. They have a huge financial incentive to make sure that never happens.”

But it would take a mistake of this magnitude, one that involves infrastructure more fundamental than Amazon and Google, to truly devastate the ecosystem as a whole. If this happened, it would be unprecedented – the closest analogy might be the 2016 attack on Dyn, a small DNS service provider, which took down the Guardian, X and others.

With the disappearance of .com, banks, hospitals, financial services and most communication platforms would disappear. Some government Internet infrastructure would still be there, such as the American secure messaging system Siprnet.

And – at least for a community of wacky experts – there would always be the Internet. There are, after all, self-hosted blogs, decentralized social platforms like Mastodon, and niche domains like “.io” for the British Indian Ocean and “.is” for Iceland.

Murdoch and Madory can imagine scenarios that would devastate others. Murdoch suggests a bug in BIND, the software language that supports DNS. Madory cites testimony from a group of Massachusetts hackers who in 1998 reported to the U.S. Congress a vulnerability that could “take down the Internet in 30 minutes.”

This vulnerability involved a system one level higher than DNS: the Border Gateway protocol, which directs all traffic on the Internet. It’s extremely unlikely, Madory says – such an event would be an “all hands on deck” scenario, and the protocol is “super resilient, otherwise it would have crashed by now.”

If the Internet ever goes down completely, it’s unclear whether it can be restarted, Murdoch says. “No one turned off the Internet after turning it on. Nobody really knows how it could be turned back on.”

In the UK there is a non-virtual emergency plan, or at least there was. If the internet goes out, people who know how it works will meet in a pub outside London and decide what to do, Murdoch says.

“I don’t know if that’s still the case. It was a few years ago and I was never told what pub it was.”