What would happen if the internet went offline for 24hrs
Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp have gone down globally in the past hour. Not a big deal really not being in contact with people for a few hours but what if the entire internet shut down for a day? What would the be most major impacts/consequences for the globe in this brief but major widespread return to a pre-globalised technological dark age?
Comments (56)
Much whinging! I remember the old forum going down for ages more than a day - the world literally stopped turning, and philosophy has still not recovered.
I mean most probably. However I was thinking more along the lines of economics, transport, health services etc. Would it not be a bit more chaotic than just inconvenient?
I think that it would cause all sorts of emergencies because everyone is so dependent on it increasingly. Being unable to use this site would probably be low on the agenda of our worries, although I once dreamt that TPF site crashed..The problem of people using Wifi for most things is going to become more of a problem though, especially as we rely on it for information in emergencies and for communication.
You realize it costs around 50 cents to make a simple phone call to just about anyone anywhere in the world at just about any payphone, right? Let alone your own cell or landline. I'm assuming you mean a true communication blackout which would be just short of a true blackout of all electricity. In places that experience severe weather such blackouts are common. Long story short, not only can your selfies and food porn wait, it will probably benefit every individual involved as well as mankind as a whole.
Edit: And even when the phones are down, there's always CB radios and satellite phones, though unless you're a highly successful drug dealer or international secret agent having the latter device in your possession is unlikely.
Another edit: And on top of that social media posts are literally just excuses to brandish some sort of accomplishment or express some sort of grievance to as many people as you possibly can while still being able to, from the safety of your home and/or convenience of your mobile device, state you were just "mentioning it" to a friend.
You tell me. I have never used any social media and don't entirely understand what it is for.
Imagine there's an internet blackout and noone is there to see it ...
in third-rate sci-fi novels, when something happens to disrupt society, people promptly turn to looting, riot, vigilante reprisals for current, recent, or long-past slights; murder, and cannibalism.
Probably something like that. If you are plump and tender, you'd just better hope the Internet keeps functioning.
Fat fingers is a drawback. I try to avoid apps, but it keeps wanting them. Very demanding. :angry:
That is hilarious.
But personally, I can survive when I lose internet service as long as I can play games on the computer.
However, if more than a week passes, I do develop symptoms of a nervous breakdown.
If only our phones could text and call without the internet.
I would be a vastly better student today than I was in the 1960s. Well, maybe. I wasted a lot of time back then and there is nothing better than the Internet for massive time wastage. But still, there is such a wealth of good information (music, history, science, philosophy fora, etc.).
I suppose the Earth is due for another Carrington Event. The globally disruptive after effects would go on for weeks or months at least, making "2020" look like a kindergarden food fight by comparison.
Also, you'd have to go back to the Sears catalogue.
Everything is quite sunny, literally.
If it isn't extreme heat, let's get our electrical grid fried. Damn man, yeah life entails suffering and all that, but these are premium level problems, we are here to witness some crazy shit going down. The privilege of being born now. :smirk:
It would be quite problematic actually. Not because of the humor-ish aspect of not being able to go to Facebook or AlJazeera or ABC or YouTube, but because lots of financial data, all kinds of data actually, now belong online almost exclusively. It might well cause a significant market problem, with who knows what else.
So not good.
Don't hold your breath.
Maybe, but communication would be a big problem.
Communication or speed, convenience, record, etc. of communication?
But then one would have to communicate with real people!
The USA has been caught with its pants down on a number of occasions (9/11 for example) but if there's a country that has a reputation of being prepared for anything, it's USA. Go USA! Save the world! :lol:
[quote=Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)]More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers.[/quote]
I was just wondering about that. Are there some core servers that run the show? Is there an internet HQ? If there is then it's an accident waiting to happen. If not, we have one less thing to worry about.
The fastest growing websites are all porn-related.
[i]"Don't follow leaders,
watch the parkin' meters"[/i]
~Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965
:up:
Quoting TheMadFool
There are 13 DNS root servers that map the internet. If those are gone it's Bye-Bye internet. Other than that everything else is quite replaceable.
The entire internet shutting down would be quite a big deal. Economists would probably label it the darkest day in human history. Major loses for all the companies generating revenue through the web. I'd imagine stock markets (including all the cryptos) would crash quite gloriously. Important infrastructure would no longer be reachable - banking, cash terminals, some health and insurance services. Big troubles for logistics. And last but not least a lot of panic and "Help! I don't know what to do with my time."
Non-resolution of the US debt ceiling impasse is both more likely and would be more devastating. Would make 2008 look like a walk in the park. The internet will still be working but the banks will not be.
Hey that's part of the plot line for the sci-fi novel that I never get around to finishing. I've discovered a lot of great material about those events, but also a youtube video by a telecoms engineer who says (dissappointingly) that modern comms infrastructure is actually pretty well shielded against this eventuality. (That part won't make it into the book.)
Still saying: if the US defaults on one of its obligations, then it's bunkers and soybeans.
Do you know how the Internet came about? A defense project, originally under something called DARPA. The whole principle was that it was decentralised, so that there was no 'central exchange' that can be knocked out. You know what TCP/IP does? All the data is split into packets, each one individually addressed, if a router goes down on one route, it will find another. That is the genius of the internet. Thank Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, here they are getting a medal from W from having thought it up.
(That's Vint Cerf, not being garrotted by Bush.)
After driving internet innovation for 20 to 30 years, being ubiquitous from the get go, and making money all these years, how are they still the fastest growing thing on line? I would think they might have plateaued somewhere along the line. Are they growing faster than YouTube? FaceBook? Amazon? Google?
I'm too cheap to buy memberships to [gay] hard core sites, but paywall sites are the wellspring. I stick to the stuff that has been circulating for years on sites like BlogSpot or Tumblr; some of the photos were first published in the early 70s, on paper!
My understanding is that it isn't expensive to produce porn. Actors and crew get paid, but not a lot, and they probably don't get much in residuals. So, are the profits in sales of content? Subscriptions to sites? Pay-per-view? Exports? Advertising on the sites for motor oil and lawn-care equipment? Viagra (fake or real)? Nitrate inhalants?
So the internet does have a weak spot, an Achilles heel, a HQ. I was under the impression that with all these techies constantly admonishing us for not having a backup for our e-data files some computer-wiz would've done something about it. No, huh?
Interesting. I had some inkling about the defense angle to the internet but failed, miserably it seems, to connect the dots. The military, I believe, always has a plan B, waiting on the wings, you know, just in case, only the internet itself is the plan B. Paradoxical in my book. What was plan A I wonder.
I don't think so. Surely the US economics have a big impact on global economics but it doesn't compare to the whole internet shutting down for a day. While this scenario would be worse for the US, it wouldn't be worse for the global economy.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, not quite. 13 servers ought to be redundant enough. Furthermore, these are more like "super-servers". It uses a system called Anycast - there's 13 main adresses but a total of over 1400 nodes. Your ISP routes you through the shortest path and off into the world wide web you go.
It's near impossible to murder the internet - I just wanted to highlight that there is a possibility. You wouldn't have to take down all of the servers either. This is just a guess but I'd imagine half of them would be enough to bring the internet to it's knees.
:pray: It's getting awfully, awfully near the wire this time around.
Hey here's a primer I wrote as part of my very first tech writing contract, way back in 2004 but most of the background info is still relevant. (This was written for a broadband communications company when everyone was first starting to get ADSL and cable connections, to provide background to end-users, support staff and sales channel.)
[quote=techradar.com]According to Similarweb analysis, adult websites Xvideos and Pornhub are among the most trafficked in the United States, receiving an average of 693.5 million and 639.6 million monthly visitors respectively.
The two pornography giants (Xvideos & Pornhub) outrank a number of major services, including Netflix (541 million), Zoom (629.5 million) and Twitch (255.3 million).[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world [...] According to the same study "globally, Muslims have the highest fertility rate, an average of 3.1 children per woman – well above replacement level (2.1)", and "in all major regions where there is a sizable Muslim population, Muslim fertility exceeds non-Muslim fertility.[/quote]
Go figure!
Copy that!
Downloaded it for reading later. :up:
Still quite in the dark about plan A and how & when it failed? It must have, why else plan B (the internet)? Perhaps the military top brass were worried about the whatever system (plan A) they were using - vulnerable in some way - and decided to transplant it, took their business elsewhere, onto a computer network à la Skynet (Terminator franchise).
At the heart of every human enterprise these days there are two must-haves:
1. (A) computer(s)
2. An internet connection
If the internet should fail, it would be as catastrophic as a world war!
I'll correct myself here after reading an article. It looks like much less is needed. Facebook platforms being down caused 30x more traffick on one of the biggest DNS providers Cloudflare.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
It may not have been very apparent because we're talking milliseconds here but essentially, Facebook & Co being offline slowed down the whole internet. Everytime one tries to access one of the platforms, a request is sent to the DNS server. The server tries to resolve the name, takes a little while, fails and throws the user an error. The big problem are actually apps and the internet of things. While a human may try a couple of times before accepting the fact that the target site is unreachable, apps will more or less constantly spam their requests.
[quote=Carrington Event (Wikipedia)]A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid. The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude, but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet, -missing by nine days[/quote]
I can picture an asteroid missing the earth by, say, a coupla million kilometers but how does the earth miss something by nine days? Do solar storms occur patches i.e. are they restricted to certain regions of the earth's orbit and did the solar storm pass through part of the earth's orbit which earth entered nine days after the solar storm had passed by it? :chin:
Apparently yes.
Could phone and text infrastructure handle a massive synchronous increase in usage globally in the event that the internet does not provide this service. I mean there must be a limit to the data those towers can transmit at any given time right?
My X kept the family in very remote places where no one knew of the world outside their own backyard. I thought I would lose my mind or die of intellectual starvation. :lol: We were not a good match, he resented that I read books and one day piled them in the yard when I was gone. I got home before he burned them because fortunately, our 6-year-old daughter slowed him down. I would not want to continue living if I couldn't get on the internet. I need the folks in the forums very much!
But he had motorcycle boots and a black leather jacket and that looked really good to me when I was 18. :lol:
I think you are right.
More like the Internet is attuned to the old nervous system, as was the telephone, telegraph, photograph, music, or--go back a few thousand years--writing, even language.
Disruptions to community can be difficult. The internet is now part of our community's communication system, as is television, telephones, radios, film, et al. I'd hate to lose them.
:ok:
The media hype would be enormous. Once people would get back online. Ooh, the horror, the horror.
Quoting 180 Proof
Extended outages in the Electric grid, especially in winter, are far more dangerous than the whimsical issue that Facebook or Twitter being down. With failure of the electric grid at winter many relying on electricity for heating might die. And the industrialized farming would have its problems too.
But not an issue we could not handle. And afterwards we would just make our back up systems more reliable.
Well idiots need entertainment too. There’s nothing more dangerous than idiocy with too much time on its hands haha
You can say that again.