Today almost all of us live online and the internet touches everything we depend on,
so it would be pretty horrifying if it all just stopped.
Across the globe there are an estimated 4.4 billion internet users, spending, on average,
6 hours per day engaged in digital activity.
In the UK, we check our smartphones every 12 minutes. It’s one of the first things
we do when we wake up and one of the last things we do at night.
Collectively, we’re a bunch of internet addicts.
To get a scale of just how big the internet has become, before the end of this video more
than 450 million messages will be sent on WhatsApp, 6.25 million people will have logged
into Facebook and 5,000 hours of video will have been uploaded to YouTube.
Indeed, the web created my job working on Debunked, and I’m not the only one.
It’s estimated that the Internet has created 2.6 jobs for every 1 it has caused to disappear.
Its economic importance is massive. By 2020, e-commerce alone will be worth more than $4
trillion to the global economy, driven by spending in places like China where more than
one in five of all retail sales are made online.
Remember, in 1995 fewer than 1% of the world was online. Today society is dependent on
it. Our power grids are coordinated via the internet. The global banking system needs
it to move money around the world. Cell phone networks rely on it to function. Public transport.
Water supplies. You name it. Almost everything is connected to the internet in some way.
So what would happen if the internet suddenly disappeared and the world went offline? And
could it all be taken down, by a single person?
I’m Stu, this is Debunked and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths, and the
facts from the misconceptions.
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For most of us shutting down the internet seems completely unthinkable, but it actually
happens more often than you think, just on a local scale. In June 2018, Algeria shut
down internet access across the entire country for three hours every day to prevent cheating
during school exams.
This anti-cheating method has been used in other parts of Africa as well as areas of
Asia.
According to a report by The Global Network Initiative, access to the web was deliberately
disrupted on more than 100 occasions in 2017 - and not always to stop people getting grades
they don’t deserve.
The consequences of shutting down the net, even for a brief window of time, can be serious.
“Shutting down digital communication often disproportionately harms marginalised and
vulnerable groups, cripples the local economy, and creates cascades of chaos with consequences
we cannot fully fathom.”
The knock on effect for the wider world isn’t small either, such disruptions are said to
have cost the global economy $200 billion between 2015 and 2016.
Obviously, cheating on your exams is a pretty serious misdemeanour but in practice, governments
look to go offline during emergencies.
Egypt famously shut down internet access for almost a week in 2011, during the Arab Spring.
The UK already has laws allowing for the internet to be shut down in a major emergency
and Russia reportedly has plans to develop an internet kill switch, which would take
the country offline in the event of a cyber crisis.
But these are examples of a single country going offline deliberately and for a short
period of time. What would happen if there was a global internet blackout that lasted
weeks or even months?
Obviously, and thankfully, that hasn’t happened because if it did, things would likely go
south pretty quickly.
“The only credible post-Internet visions are all tied to civilizational collapse [like]
global pandemics [and] nuclear catastrophes. The hidden message in all of those scenarios
is that if the only way to convincingly imagine a world without an Internet is to imagine
a world without civilization, then to a first approximation, the Internet has become our
civilization.”
So, in the first few days, panic begins to sweep the world and people respond by stockpiling
food.
It’s not long before shelves are empty and restocking them won’t be easy, since stores
use online inventory systems to keep track of supplies and order replacements.
Actually buying the food is also a challenge.
The global economy would have ground to a halt pretty quickly. Stock markets are closed
and bank to bank transactions have ceased.
Your card has stopped working and so have most ATMs, since they’re usually connected
to the net.
Cash becomes unbelievably important. Let’s hope you have a piggy bank.
After a week things are starting to get serious. Local power outages grow into large scale
blackouts as national power grids become imbalanced without the internet to coordinate them.
Gas pipelines, which need power and the internet, also stop working.
Crime is starting to ramp up and the economy has descended into a barter system. People
start grouping together for protection. Smaller businesses have gone bust. Things are looking
bleak.
By month’s end, fuel shortages are preventing food deliveries and riots are common, especially
around distribution centres. It’s become a fight for survival.
After a year, we’re looking at the complete breakdown of society. According to a particularly
bleak prediction by the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, around a billion people would have
died from a combination of unrest, cold and starvation. The global economy would be back
to 1930s levels.
For all that to happen though, someone would need to take the whole web down, and that
won’t be easy.
The internet is designed to keep working even in the most extreme circumstances.
Take a look at this map. At first you might be mistaken for thinking it’s something
to do with the human brain but you’d be wrong. It’s actually a partial map of the
internet from back in 2005, with each line essentially representing a connection within
in it.
What it also shows is just how decentralised the whole thing is. Let’s say you and I
download the same file from the internet, the data could end up taking very different
routes before it reaches us.
Ultimately, you might be able to take out one part of the internet, but the rest will
keep on trucking. Even in areas that were disrupted, the information travelling through
that section could potentially get re-routed and still reach its intended destination.
In other words, the internet is a pretty tough nut to crack.
But it’s not invulnerable. Take the physical backbone of the internet, for example. Approximately
99% of all internet traffic is pinged around the globe via underwater sea cables, which
are cheaper and faster than sending data via satellite.
Now, you’re probably assuming that there’s loads of these cables given just how much
data we’re producing. I mean, the USA alone uses over 2.6 million gigabytes of internet
data every minute.
Surprisingly though, that doesn’t translate into a lot of cables. At the end of 2017 there
were 428 cables doing the heavy duty work of connecting our planet.
What isn’t a surprise though, is that those cables stretch out over an incredibly long
distance, coming in at 750,000 miles combined, that could loop the Earth 30 times and means
there’s a lot of opportunities where you could cut those precious cables, and cable
cutting has happened before.
In 2008, several cables were cut in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the result was widespread
internet chaos. India’s nationwide network suffered 60% disruption, Egypt got it even
worse with 70%. Approximately 75 million people were left with limited internet access across
the region. The damage was thought to have been caused by a ship dropping anchor.
Plus, there are only a few locations where these undersea cables rise out of the ocean
to connect us here on land. These hubs are also potential weak spots in the internet’s
armour. The cable hub in Miami, for example, handles around 90% of the internet traffic
between North America and Latin America. If someone were to destroy it you’d be causing
a lot of grief to millions of people.
Even if you can’t swim or don’t want to leave the house, you still might be able to
bring about an internet apocalypse.
Most of you probably won’t remember October 21st 2016, possibly because you were so bored
as sites like Netflix, Reddit and Spotify, amongst others, were down for many users in
the US and Europe.
The huge outage of key sites was the result of a huge cyberattack on Dyn, a company that
provides domain name services, which are pretty crucial to how we use the internet.
Basically, every time you type in a web address, let’s say www.YouTube.com, the domain name
system translates that into the IP address of the server you’re trying to access.
Without it, instead of having to remember YouTube.com you’d have to type in something
like this… https://208.65.153.238/. It doesn’t exactly scream memorable.
Not only that but without the DNS you’d have to remember those long strings of numbers
for every website you wanted to use. In other words, take down the entire DNS and you make
the internet unusable for most people.
The attack on Dyn was what’s known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack,
where the company’s servers were effectively overwhelmed by fake information requests,
meaning everyday users like you and me couldn’t get through. Despite the impressive scale
of the attack, with users across the Eastern part of the USA particularly affected, the
attack lasted just a day and it wasn’t constant. It came in a series of waves, each lasting
a couple of hours.
But what if a cable cutting mad person decided to go rogue or a dedicated cyber criminal
wanted to send a deluge of traffic to DNS services across the world? Could they take
down the internet? Could they do it single handedly?
Let’s imagine our villain is a really good swimmer, then it might be possible for them
to cut a cable or two. In 2013, for example, three men were arrested in Egypt after attempting
to cut through an undersea internet cable. They’d damaged it severely enough that Egyptian
online services suffered a noticeable slowdown.
Two years later, someone simply went cable cutting by climbing down manholes in California
and managed to slow down internet speeds across the state.
But here’s the thing about cable cutting, it happens fairly regularly and it’s no
big deal. Ships dropping anchor, sharks and natural
disasters have all damaged them in the past. Back in 2008, Stephan Beckert of TeleGeography,
commented that "Cable cuts happen on average once every three days”. While the submarine
cable repair company, Global Marine Systems, also noted that more than 50 repair operations
took place in the Atlantic alone in 2007.
They don’t take long to fix either. In 2018, when the entire country of Mauritania lost
internet access thanks to cut cable, it only took 48 hours to rectify the problem. Nine
other African countries were also hit but didn’t go offline, which shows how robust
the system is and why you’d have to take out a lot of cables to make a real impact.
And, even if, by some miracle, you and over 400 of your closest friends managed to cut
all the cables at the same time, that’s only 99% of the Internet.
You’d still have the satellite-based network left to deal with. We’d have to get used
to 144p on YouTube videos again but it wouldn’t be a total internet Armageddon.
What about a huge Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on DNS services, one on a scale
way bigger than the Dyn attack?
In theory, a particularly skilful hacker group could infect and take over hundreds of thousands
of computers or unsecured internet-of-things devices - like routers, DVD players security
cameras - to create a network of machines under their control, a so-called botnet.
In theory, you could create such a botnet singlehandedly, if you wanted to, after all
the botnet that was eventually used to cripple Dyn was created by just three people.
Armed with a similar army of zombie machines, our super hacker could overwhelm key domain
name services and effectively render the internet useless. The scary thing is we may be getting
closer to this than you imagined.
According to John Bowers, co-author of a cyber-security study by Harvard University released in 2018:
“The concentration of DNS services into a small number of hands… exposes single
points of failure that weren’t present under the more distributed DNS paradigm of yesteryear”
That sounds more complicated than it really is. Basically what John is saying is that
the number of companies providing crucial domain name services has gotten smaller and
smaller, which means you only have to take out a few key players to cripple the internet.
One such key player is Verisign, which provides services for many top-level domains, you overwhelm
them and you make the internet pretty much useless. Now you’re probably thinking I’m
exaggerating but sadly I’m not.
As computer security expert, Bruce Schneier has pointed out:
“Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and
.net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the
most common top-level domains”
In other words websites ending in .com or .net (plus many others) would be unreachable,
unless you somehow memorised the IP address of all your favourite sites, which I’m going
to go out on a limb and say you haven’t.
While the fact that companies like Verisign are facing increasing numbers of DDoS attacks,
which are only getting more complex and persistent is certainly no good thing, such attacks are
not going to kill the internet. After all, a botnet needs the internet to work in order
to be effective.
In effect DDoS attacks like the one on Dyn are a pain in the ass, with potentially huge
consequences, but they don’t represent a practical internet Armageddon.
As Gleb Budman, CEO of BackBlaze, a cloud storage provider notes:
“Even the large-scale attack against Dyn (dine) still only knocked out certain sites
down for certain people for certain amounts of time.”
The internet will very much exists before, during and after such an attack, it might
just be massively inconvenient to use for a while.
Ultimately, a single person could cause a lot of online havoc. They might take down
key service providers using a botnet, they’re unlikely to take down all key services simultaneously,
worldwide and for a sustained period of time.
They might even be able to cause an internet blackout in an entire country or region by
cutting cables, but they’re not going to be able to cut all the cables quickly enough
to bring down the entire web.
Of course, countries could mobilise their resources to cause internet destruction on
a bigger and perhaps permanent level, but as for you or me? We’ll probably have to
think of alternative plans for becoming supervillains.
Most of us have now used the internet for over a decade, or even since it was born.
In this time, we have all created hundreds of logins for different websites, and nearly
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Thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time.