What Would Happen If the Internet Went Down ... Forever?

[Deleted member 79987]

I think all the Facebook addicts would implode, not to mention political propaganda people.

Me... I'd probably write a letter to a friend, then go out to the range for some plinkin'.

 

[ShawnZR-1]

Please spill the beans, I like panics

There are a couple of ways to really slow the Internet down, one is poison the root DNS records. This wouldn't be easy but it can be done "from the inside".

The second is to mess with the BGP advertisements. This one I have first hand experience with, though again, it would have to be done from the inside from a valid ASN.
In either case, there will be localized to widespread slow-downs, outages or strange results but they can be recovered from pretty easily once it's identified.

 

[rbstern]

It's a less realistic scenario than the entire grid going down, which would bring much larger problems with it, more quickly.

Three days of no lights, and the wheels fall off the whole sha-bang.

 

[rbstern]

There are a couple of ways to really slow the Internet down, one is poison the root DNS records. This wouldn't be easy but it can be done "from the inside".

But that doesn't break the Internet. It just breaks DNS. IP addresses still work in that scenario, as would local host DNS, so people would find ways to jury rig critical functions. Yeah, millenials would get freaked out, but planes would still fly and groceries would still get delivered.

 

[Torn]

There are a couple of ways to really slow the Internet down, one is poison the root DNS records. This wouldn't be easy but it can be done "from the inside".

The second is to mess with the BGP advertisements. This one I have first hand experience with, though again, it would have to be done from the inside from a valid ASN.
In either case, there will be localized to widespread slow-downs, outages or strange results but they can be recovered from pretty easily once it's identified.

I’m so ignorant of the tech/IT world that you could have written that in Mandarin Chinese and I wouldn’t have known the difference! I guess I can’t panic if I can’t figure out the crisis but thanks for trying.

 

[Torn]

It's a less realistic scenario than the entire grid going down, which would bring much larger problems with it, more quickly.

Three days of no lights, and the wheels fall off the whole sha-bang.

Now you’re talking.

 

[ShawnZR-1]

But that doesn't break the Internet. It just breaks DNS. IP addresses still work in that scenario, as would local host DNS, so people would find ways to jury rig critical functions. Yeah, millenials would get freaked out, but planes would still fly and groceries would still get delivered.

Mostly correct, but with soooo many things moving to the AWS and Azure cloud environments, it's nearly impossible to resolve via IP anymore. They are constantly changing, and the TTL has been set lower and lower to accommodate. That could actually make it easier to mess with DNS since it would propagate very quickly.

 

[webicknell]

 

[HVACGuy]

I'd have a lot more money left over every month...

 

[Stampede]

what did people in 1978 do? play outside more i guess.

We went fishing, camping, to the cassette tape store in the mall and went to see family and friends.
That's where a "Sunday drive" came from!