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Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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The only thing that could take the entirety of the Internet for a bit of time is a massive EMF event that damages enough infrastructure to disable point-to-point communication between nodes. This means something like a Coronal Mass Ejection so large it cooks all satellites on its way in (on one side of orbit at least), then toasts a lot of other protected hardware on the ground.
The P2P nature of the internet would be hard to kill in totality with one event in any sense of the word. At the the very least, it would quick to get local infrastructure up within hours, assuming the entire DNS system isn't destroyed.
CMEs cause very long-length disturbances so you need a conductor of quite a length to cause problems. The power grid is one example. Anything that's on a solar panel and not connected to the grid would not be a problem because the wires are much shorter and don't have enough space with which to build up a charge.
You seem to think the entire world is connected by fiber now. Not the case. 98% of long distance cable runs across the world are still air run copper. That won't immediately impact high dollar facilities like datacenters or undersea cables that are interconnected, but everything else it will take a hit.