Could the internet go down all over the world at once?

Why a global internet outage is almost impossible

According to our colleagues at Live Science , the internet is often called a "network of networks," and that's not just a fancy expression.

It consists of millions of individual pieces: home Wi-Fi networks, company servers, data centers, undersea cables, and satellites. For the internet to shut down worldwide , a huge number of these elements would have to fail almost simultaneously. This is possible in theory, but extremely unlikely in practice.

One reason is that the internet was originally designed as an extremely resilient system. It contains many disparate technologies, backup routes, and autonomous segments. Even if the global network fails , the local internet at home, in the office, or within a company can continue to function. A complete collapse of the entire system would require either colossal resources or a fantastic coincidence of events.

How the Internet is protected from a global outage

When you send a message or open a website, the data doesn't travel along a single wire. It's broken into small packets and sent along different routes, choosing the fastest one. If one route fails, the packets simply move on to another.

Therefore, a broken submarine cable , a failure of a major ISP, or even a hacker attack rarely lead to a catastrophe. Even high-profile outages of services like Cloudflare typically last hours, not days, and don't "infect" the entire internet.

There are also more worrisome scenarios, such as a powerful solar storm or a major power grid failure. In such cases, recovery may take longer.

But states and large companies have contingency plans in place: backup communication channels, cloud-based data backups, generators, and emergency protocols. Even when individual countries intentionally shut down the internet during protests, such outages rarely last long.

What happens if the internet disappears?

It's important to understand, however, that the consequences of a global internet outage would be far more serious than just the absence of memes.

Hospitals, transportation, energy, and even military systems depend on the internet. And the more important it becomes to the world, the more effort is devoted to protecting it. The paradox is that the internet's growth doesn't make it weaker, but stronger. A complete shutdown is possible, but the likelihood of such a scenario remains extremely low.