Technology

While it's good to thought-experiment this sort of thing out to try to understand the most problematic areas, the reality is that the internet will never "completely" go down it's too heavily distributed and not quite enough of a monoculture for even a perfect storm of worst case scenarios to conspire to bring everything down. Like the article mentions, even if only two computers are still running and networked together that is still technically an island of the "Internet".

And even if everything somehow did completely go away for a time, of course we could start it up again, worst case we would just start making islands and then reconnecting distant islands to each other one at a time; the same way we restart that other great distributed machine: the power grid; the same way we created the Internet the first time, and actually probably much faster because most of the planning, layout, protocols and physical infrastructure is already well-established. It will just take time and work, it will be a a slow and chaotic process, modern life will grind to a halt at first, those things we rely on like the power grid, utilities, and payment networks will be prioritized but will only gradually start working again bit by bit, and it will never get back to exactly the way it was when it started, but the same sort of things happened after 9/11, in the great east coast blackout in North America, during COVID lockdowns. The world shuts down, the things we do and the way we do those things suddenly changes, becomes uncertain and difficult, non-essential stuff might not even be possible for awhile. But essential stuff mostly still gets done no matter how awkward it is to figure out how to do it. It's not pretty or fun, but we manage, until eventually the problem has gone away and we don't have to manage anymore.