Can the Internet Really Go Down — Everywhere?

By Guest Author

January 31st, 2008

By George

Apparently yes.

The vulnerability is scary. According to CNN.com, an anchor from a ship may have severed an undersea cable in the Mediterranean Sea and taken out Internet service in large regions of the Middle East and Asia (including China and India).

With so much information and critical services now Web-based – the cost of this outage will be in the billions. The United States has been spared from the outage (although the Web was in slow motion most of the morning).

But U.S. business have off-shored so much technical and customer support overseas that companies like IBM and Intel are still assessing the damage to their operations. It probably won’t be pretty.

Stay tuned to this story because it has greater ramifications than just the business losses and downtime. Government and business these days can barely function without the Internet (I think of our own operations at Racepoint Group – with a lot of our tools and many of our databases Web-based).

If an anchor can wipe out the Internet on two continents – the discussion falling out of this disaster will be centered on what will need to be done to fully protect and deliver the Web – while having reliable back up solutions in place.

 

Entry Filed under: Technology & Innovation