Without a doubt, the internet is one of the world’s most useful inventions. Its a store, hub, social center, dictionary, encyclopedia, and more. However, what if the internet crashed, failed, or went down?
I looked for answers to this question on 4 questions and answers sites and here is what I found.
Quora
Answered by Vivek Ravindranath
If internet stops working…. What if Scenarios
Scenario 1:
Internet Stops for a day
- People discover that their smartphones can make phone calls too and discover the calling function on their phones
- 3.2 percent Stock Brokers and Bond traders suffer with stress related cardiac arrests
- People in western societies discover the “Cash” they had forgotten
- The Bank gets visits from long forgotten customers
- Kids actually go to school and try to recognise their teachers
- Lot of millennials know the meaning of the following things in their workplaces: Fax, Machines, Copiers
- Taking notes using Paper - Pen
- Free time….. and releasing the the colleague you know from facebook and colleague sitting next to you are two different people
- Spouses actually see each others faces for more than 10 minutes
- Children discover that there are cable channels on something called television
- TV viewership shoots up 1200 percent
- Millennials see TV series with commercial Breaks for the first rime.. Eeeks….
Scenario 2:
Internet Stops for a week
- Financial markets have crashed. Trading on all assets is stopped
- 7.9 percent stockbrokers suffer cardiac arrests
- There is a run on the banks
- Amazon buys Target, Google buys top 3 TV channels for “Diversification”
- It is mandatory to attend training on managing paper money
- Kids realise that they can talk to each other
- Meaning of grass is green and Sky is blue moves from the realm of theoretical knowledge to practical knowledge
- The US postal service is now the 5tth most valued company in the world
- Millennials see the inside of a supermarket and are amazed at the difficulty levels of shopping at a retail outlet
- Obesity levels fall 1/2 percent around the world
- 27000 garbage dumps are cleared to uncover forgotten children's parks
Scenario 3:
Internet Stops for a Month
- Google, Amazon and 30 other top internet companies file for Bankruptcy
- Apple introduces I courier… where content is delivered at your doorstep i SD cards — Its valuation shoots 1000 percent…
- But the markets are not trading… converting shares to physical form is the new BPO mantra
- UBER is now a call taxi service, with a call center based somewhere where Americans hate
- DVD rentals…. heard of them?… are back in business, Also includes Blu ray , Green ray and Black Ray disks
- Gold becomes valuable and pieces triple
- Millennials read paper books for the first time….. and realise that the spelling of “You” is not “U” but “You”
There is no apocalypse because the human ability to adapt is immense… and we will move on and find a way!!!
Originally on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-happens-if-the-Internet-fails-all-over-the-world-for-one-day
By aj0220
There would probably be a huge boost in pregnancies 9 months down the road. At my local OB/GYN hospital, they saw a MASSIVE increase in the number of births after a blizzard had hit the surrounding cities which caused outages and forced people to stay in.
By Hectorc34
If the internet went out for 24hours, there’s a whole new world to discover outside the internet! Like all of those video game worlds I can play again!
By Artiquecircle
Die hards would be hitting refresh every 5 seconds to be he first to post to become Reddit immortalized for karma
Stack Exchange
Scenario:
From 1995 to 2015 we have become heavily reliant on the internet for a lot of our everyday life. Skip ahead another 20 years and under the assumption that our society and technology keep evolving in a similar way to the past 20 years, we are now live in a world where the internet is the centre of everything. It is no longer something that makes our lives easier but it has grown into something that a lot of our systems are now dependant on. Even in today's world we are seeing this - in 20 years from now the dependancy will be much greater.
In this futuristic world, what would happen if an unexpected and unexplained event hit the internet and suddenly all around the world the internet simultaneously shut down? Every connection is lost. And the event causes major problems with the internet that mean it could take years of work to get it back up and running again.
I'm not interested in what the event that shuts it down could be. Consider it a theoretical event. What would happen in the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks following the shut down? What would be the initial reaction? How would this affect the world?
Answered by Green
The scenario you describe could be the result of highly coordinated attack by an ultra-radical anti-technology group that has managed to simultaneously attack and knock out every Tier 1 network provider and every Tier 2 provider on the planet. I'm exceptionally impressed with their ability to pull this off. They have destroyed the world.
One could stage attacks on the BGP protocol used to control routing between large networks but attacks of this kind wouldn't result in a long term outage because the network operators are very careful to make sure their networks stay up....after all, that's what their customers are paying for.
Boom
Every router and switch at the Tier 1 and Tier 2 network providers locations are gone. Millions of devices have just disappeared. Vanished. The wires are just dangling there.
Outage+1 minute
People will respond with "Hey, is the internet working for you?" "Nope, I can't get to Google or Facebook." Internet addicts will start to feel the first pangs of withdrawl. All phone calls halt. Financial institutions who depend on Internet connectivity to clear transactions will start to feel the pain. High frequency trading companies will absolutely lose their minds, as will every engineer in the T1 & T2 network operations centers. In an instant, untold billions of dollars of investment have vanished. While the ability to build new routers and switches remains intact, the money to buy them is gone. New switches and routers are suddenly priceless and worthless at the same time. Priceless because every network operator on the planet wants them. Worthless because without another router on the other end, a single router can't do much.
The electrical grid which has been smartened up no longer functions as well because coordination between power providers cannot occur. Having the load from the switches and routers disappear may cause damage to steam generators as they will suddenly overspeed. But other power generations sources will enjoy the decrease in load.
Remote surgeries will initiate their Internet-failure protocols to close up the patient safely. Surgeries where the surgeon is on site will continue, though who knows when/if he'll get paid for his services.
Outage+30 minutes
Internet addicts are having fits as is every single teenage boy addicted to the World of Warcraft (or whatever online game Blizzard is running). All commerce has stopped. Credit cards don't work. Let's assume that cash has been replaced with cryptocurrency....which also no longer works because to clear a cryptocurrency transaction requires an internet connection. Stores will be able to sell things using the very primitive "CHUNK-CHUNK" paper based records. They won't be able to clear these. Every single stock and commodities exchange on the planet has frozen. Packages in transit over UPS will arrive if they are already on the truck but no new packages can be shipped.
Outage+1 hour
Ham radio operators begin to share information about the outage. They describe the scope of the outage in their area and over the next couple of hours the scope of the outage begins to take shape. Mesh networks (which hopefully are widespread at this point), kick into high gear to share information about what's going on. Connectivity within a town or city may be high but connectivity between cities is zero. Mesh networks can't handle that kind of load.
Millions are stranded at airports because boarding passes can no longer be checked. It's like 9/11 again, only it's everywhere and no one can pay for alternate transit. Container ships with the goods of civilization arrive at port, are unloaded but the containers just sit on the docks because no one can figure out where to send them with no way to call to ask someone.
Outage+6 hours
Mayors, governors and heads of state declare a state of emergency but not many people can hear them. Panic has set in. Any kind of a store with food is now empty. Violence escalates as people begin to forcibly take the things they think they need to survive.
Outage+24 hours
Factories that build routers and switches will go into monster overdrive as demand for new routers has gone through the roof. It will take years to manufacture new routers to satisfy the demand. Businesses of all kinds have shutdown or are in panic mode, hospitals too.
Riots are in full swing. Police and fire departments are stretched beyond breaking. Vigilante justice and neighborhood protection groups spring into existence.
Outage+1 week
The riots and chaos of the last week have largely subsided. The barter system has returned in force. Small items are now used as currency in place of money or a local cryptocurrency has sprung up, supported by mesh networking. Communities have shrunk and become geographically focused. People have met their neighbors for the first time in their lives. Anyone with a mesh network node is extremely popular. Anyone with mesh networking expertise is extremely valuable. Google and other Internet companies have lost significant portions of their stock value. Phone manufacturers have also lost practically all value and will close or be supported as "too important to fail" and kept on nationalize life support till the market comes back.
Medical and food supplies are running low because there's no way to reorder them.
For a better idea about what happens when commerce significantly slows in a country, look at the changes in Greece between April 2015 and mid-July 2015. This situation is worse because commerce has stopped, where Greece has only slowed down (a lot).
Demand for Flash drives and external storage media go through the roof as people fall back to moving data around by hand. Postal and package service may resume service but with significant delays.
Every single business that staked their productivity on Applications-In-The-Cloud are having a really really tough time. They can't do business and won't be able to do business for a long time. Secondly, they may never be able to get their data back because the companies that hold their data may go out of business and take the data with them.
Outage+1 month
Internet providers are nationalized or placed under centralized government control in order to manage the trickle of routers and switches coming out of the factories. Companies have fallen back to the old paper forms they used to use the 1980s. Snarky gits laugh at the organizations who went all paperless.
P2P application such as BitCoin and BitTorrent become the primary means of or paying for things or distributing information. These applications work because they don't need any centralized source to run. On a network of three computers (with the appropriate software) these are completely functional networks.
Open source software (distributed source control, compilers, editors, operating systems etc), already powerful in their 40+ years of operation, step up to fill the gaps in services left open by the disappearance of the large providers such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon (and whoever else may pop up in the next 20 years.)
Outage+1 year
Internet access is slowly returning but the quality of service is significantly slower than it was. Shoddy equipment causes datacenter fires, setting back the return of internet service for months or years.
Ham radio becomes an unprecedentedly popular past-time, causing a boost in science education.
The mints of the world have been de-mothballed and begun to turn out hard currency again. Designs of old currency are renewed.
Culture in general will go through a period of introspection on whether Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, are really all that important anyway? Many people may say "No, it isn't" and find other things to do.
Merging all the cryptocurrencies that have sprung up back into a single national currency becomes a legal nightmare.
The courts are absolutely chalk full of lawsuits. Legislation will need to be written to cut down the number of lawsuits and handle the aftermath of the Outage.
Outage+10 years
Internet service is back for everyone. Network topologies rely increasingly on mesh principles. Large telecom providers have been bailed out. Market share in the network equipment space is unrecognizable compared to pre-Outage as new companies appeared to fill the staggering demand for new routers and switches. Cryptocurrencies become more tolerant against widespread disconnects.
Mints and postal services the world over issue 10 year commemorative coins and stamps.
Some people will ask "Where were you when the Outage hit?"
[Update]
While the dedicated routers may be gone, the ability to route Internet traffic hasn't completely disappeared, it's just grown horribly more inefficient and lower capacity. Routers are just computers with lots of network ports and a specialized form factor to better fit into data centers. The only difference between a router and a general computer is the number of network ports and the software running on the computer.
There are also long distance microwave transmitters that can move traffic tens of miles at a time. Long distance data trading could happen this way.
Outage+1 day
Inventive network operators will begin to repurposing multi-port servers to be routers. The capacity of these machines is far below what used to be available but at least some data will flow. Prioritization of traffic in these early days will be intensely political.
Originally appeared on Stack Exchange: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/20-years-into-the-future-what-would-happen-if-the-internet-failed-semi-permane
What If? HQ
Answered by Bentable
Let’s suppose that the internet just suddenly crashed…
***In America***
One day, I was using Facebook, then I saw the message:
NO_INTERNET_ACCESS
AHHHHH, No!!!
I was just in the middle of writing a post…..
Oh well, I’ll just reload the page and start over, I guess
**after spamming the reload for a minute**
Maybe its my router..
**reboots router**
Ugh, why won’t it work????
**idea**
I know! I’ll just look up how to fix the internet
Oh wait…
The internet isn’t working…
Don’t worry…
um..
I think I can live without Facebook..
Just for a few minutes at least..
you know..until the internet is back on
**10 minutes later***
Ugh what the heck is wrong!!!!!!!
STUPID ROUTER
**throws router out the window**
**screaming**
I WANT MY FACEBOOK!!!!!!!!!!!
AHHHHHH!!!
I HATE EVERYONE!!!!!
………..
*******In China*****
Watching a propoganda video..
**ERROR: NO INTERNET ACCESs DETECTED**
Oh well..
It only happen 80% of the time, so yeah
**In North Korea**
Waiiiiiit. What’s Internet??
Oh that thing.
Well our glorious leader Kim Jun Un loves us and doesn’t want our brains all mushy with real info, so he censored everything
**In Africa**
Oh, the internet crashed?
Well, most of us don’t have computers so whatever.
Originally appeared on What If? HQ: What if the internet crashed?
Me, Personally
I would probably sit by my PC and wait for Medium.com to load.
What would you do if the internet went down? Comment Below!
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