Very theoretical question.
You can isolate the networks that are part of the Internet by switching off the submarine communication cables. They are considered a military asset by the countries and defended as such.
That’s an excellent idea! It’s a pretty badly failed experiment.
It used to be possible as networks could advertise that they owned IP ranges that they didn’t actually own using BGP, which is what’s used for high level routing. This is what China did around 2010 where they allegedly routed all the internet traffic in the world through China for like 10 minutes. I guess somebody could do that and then just drop every packet.
I expect that’s not possible anymore though, but I’ve been out the game a while so I don’t know for sure.
Just mess with BGP announcements
Kill top level dns
Internet access could be disabled in a couple of ways (but not limited to)
- By ISPs
- By Cloud providers as more and more people are using them
- By government organisations
But the whole concept of internet will carry on IMO. After all, its just a large LAN.
Technically it’s a bunch of LANs that are connected to each other
A Wider and less Local LAN, if you will
Coronal Mass Ejection perhaps
Solar flairs are the sword of Damocles hanging over all the internet. It’s only a matter of when the next https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
It may be a few decades away, or next week. But everyone will get a notice of two days that all online data and communications will be destroyed , or not available at all, for at least a year
Solar “flares”, right?
I’m pretty sure my subconscious meant to type it, for unknown reasons. And I’m not going to change it. Maybe I want the internet to go out with style
😆👍👍 So it should!
We already had a Carrington event in May of 2024, so there won’t be one in the near future. It happens every 50 years, and during a solar eclipse.
The internet is very resilient at this point.
You would probably need to drop a couple of nukes or orchestrate a combined strategic takeout of thousands of sites
Instructions unclear: nuked every city.
Chill, Gandhi.
Please be the chilling now, here today
I mean I feel like it’s kind of hard to define what “the internet” really is because it’s so decentralized. Like if you cut all the undersea cables and split the internet into multiple parts, which part is the real internet?
And even if all the commercial ISPs went away, people could still connect their networks together through phone lines or mesh networking so it would be hard to say the internet was really gone
It might die slowly if you take down all root dns servers and keep them off long enough.
Maybe if you disturb BGP between isp’s enough
but I can’t see how either can be done, it’s quite resilliant
Depends how you define “the Internet”. But if couple of big tier1 carriers null route their BGP, the Internet becomes more or less unusable for large parts, especially now that most of it is synonymous to 5-6 large websites and SaaS providers.
Practically it is not possible in the vast majority of countries in the world.
I guess if there is no electrical power In the entire country…
