How safe is the internet?

To take the internet down as a whole would be a mammoth task indeed. With the networked nature of the internet, there’s hundreds if not thousands of elements which would need to cease functioning for it all to stop. Many of which are highly secure, protected facilities or underwater cables, etc. I’d say it’s highly unlikely for it to all fall down unless something really bad is happening in the world.

Popular links which tie countries or continents together can break or be destroyed (such as the cable in the sea near india(?) which got damaged recently and disrupted a lot of internet traffic), but that just slows things down or makes the odd site unreachable. You could end up with something like that which disrupts your connection to the ‘net and makes everything unreachable for you, but again, unless the world was really up shit creek, that would be fixed relatively quickly.

I don’t think it’s a rational fear. If things have become so bad that the whole internet is down, you’ve got bigger things to worry about than not having access to your music and photos.

Really good points. Thanks Damien. You clearly know your sh*t.

Can you give me more clarity on one piece? You said, “you could end up with something like that which disrupts your connection to the ‘net and makes everything unreachable for you, but again, unless the world was really up shit creek, that would be fixed relatively quickly.”

Who fixes those cables? Is it the huge communications companies?

Also, is that kind of blackout more likely in rural areas than in cities? I live in the bay area, for instance, and couldn’t imagine the whole region losing internet. That’s crazy. But a small town out on the Pacific Ocean – that, I can imagine. Is that fairly accurate, and based in reality?

I think what Damien was getting at (and he can correct if I’m wrong) was that you could lose your individual connection (or your provider could lose theirs)... just like electricity, telephone service or even water if the you’re connection to the hub is somehow severed, you get no joy.

Also, most providers don’t actually own the physical medium that carries the information since it’s such a huge investment. So they lease bandwidth from the big boys (AT&T maybe???) and then parcel it off to you for $x.xx a month. So a problem either with the big boys or your providers hub would cause a problem with your service.

So while someone in the bay area will most likely have a connection, the local cable company may have something go wrong and some of their customers may not have a connection for a few hours.

Like Damien said as well, it doesn’t happen often and is usually back up quickly, just like other utilities.

To the original question, not putting your information on the internet because you’re worried about an outage would be similar to not buying food because you’re worried the refrigerator might go out. It could happen, but bacon tastes good.

Mmmm, bacon.

Amazon S3 went down for a while a few months ago. Twitter was without images for many hours.

Comcast had a problem with a DNS server in Chicago that knocked out most of their cable Internet users a few years ago. (this was a easy fix I you know the IP addresses of non-Comcast DNS servers, the average user went about a day without Internet access)

And there used to be a bunch of Windows nasties that used unprotected computers to flood the Internet with traffic. Sometimes it stopped working or got very slow. Luckily Windows is much more secure and this hasn’t happened in a while.

I wouldn’t really trust the network if you need that presentation for work in the morning. But if you want to store an Amy Grant song or a picture I wouldn’t really worry about it.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/breaking_news_all_online_data

The internet is stored on servers/drives. The physical storage of one or more websites is done in server units. You can buy your little piece of space on one or more hard drives. There are a lot of backups etc. so a virus would not destroy all of the internet, just something like a simple set back. Big companies have several units all over the world. So if something “breaks” customers from companies like google will hardly notice it. There is really one thing that can destroy the internet and that’s a power shortage. And for a power shortage to be global, I’d say judgment day or worse is upon us. So forget checking your e-mail.

The internet will evolve and maybe one day the whole server farm thing is something outdated, and everybody wears a little piece of the internet on a device like the Ipod. Websites will be pieced together p2p or you can store a million terrabite on one mini sd-card, sharing a broadband connection 24/7. who knows…I know my kids would laugh when they see the iPhone in a museum… 3G, 16Gig what kind of toy is this?!

The Internet was designed as a communication network that would survive WWIII. Parts may fall, but the whole thing is just a big workaround. The biggest actual danger to an individual that I can see is the absence of “net neutrality,” which would be a law allowing your Internet provider to decide what you can and cannot access through their wires. Another potential danger would be something like China’s censorship, should the government hide things that aren’t “proper” for good citizens to see. However, these dangers are largely ideological, not mechanical. It would take a whole lot of something bad to actually shut down the Internet.

As other people have stated, it would take a great deal to take the entire internet down.

But I don’t think that’s really what you’re wondering. Because even if Google stays up, you still won’t have your photographs when Flickr fails. The individual websites that we use to store our data, our personal files, our correspondences, and records of our life are fallible, especially since they are run by companies—they cost money to run—and we are in the midst of a tumultuous time economically. Do not trust your data on the internet. Anything that is important to you (blog entries, Facebook messages, emails, photographs, videos, whatever) make sure you keep copies offline.

Khoi Vinh said it so much more elegantly than I can:

“In my view, it’s a given that some of these Web businesses will fail. Personally, I doubt it will be Google, but after watching trillions of dollars of wealth vanish in the market over the past several weeks, I tend to doubt Google’s potential for implosion a little less today than I did six months ago. As for smaller players, who knows if they will survive or not? The size of a company is certainly not a reliable shield against failure, but being small doesn’t necessarily guarantee a company will be around in the long term, either. I just don’t think that it’s realistic to assume that all of the data we’re storing online is safe. So a friendly reminder: back up.”

The professional term for this is Cloud Computing. You’re trusting your data to the “cloud”, which is another way of saying servers, “out there” on the Internet. Googling this term will bring up a lot of discussions both for and against trusting your data to the cloud. I’ve been hearing stories of people not being able to get back into a randomly locked Google account and that honestly worries me because I have a lot of emails and documents stored there.

If you do trust your data to the cloud, it’s best to know how to back up your data, or migrate it to another service. With Gmail you can download your email through a mail client and make a backup. The fact that it’s so easy to do instills confidence in the system. Compare to Flickr, where I can’t find an option to backup all photos to a local hard drive. This is why I always keep my photos backed up personally.

Individual countries can have their internet ordered to be shut down, (like Egypt) filtered, or certain sites blocked completely, but as a whole, it WOULD be possible, but it would take some time.

So I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Just be sure to make backup copies of all your important data and you’ll be fine.

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/how-do-you-shut-down-the-internet-whole-country-1281/

The article is how Egypt shut down its internet.