How Facebook Took Themselves Off The Internet … A Lesson In Resilience And A Need To Decentralise
In a post-pandemic world, one thing that we are now sure of is that we are almost completely dependent on the Internet for both our social and working lives. Over the past few decades, it has embedded itself into our lives, and we would struggle to be without it for any amount of time. ‘Digital-by-default’ has become the focus for many things, but when you can’t even connect to an online service, we often have little to fall back on. While it might be inconvenient to lose your Facebook posts for a few hours, it is not so good to bring down a nation’s transport or health care infrastructure.
So the Internet isn’t the large-scale distributed network that DARPA tried to create, and which could withstand a nuclear strike on any part of it. At its core is a centralised infrastructure of routing devices and of centralised Internet services. The protocols its uses are basically just the ones that were drafted when we connected to mainframe computers from dumb terminals. Overall, though, a single glitch in its core infrastructure can bring the whole thing crashing to the floor. And then if you can’t get connected to the network, you often will struggle to fix it. A bit like trying to fix your car, when you have locked yourself out, and don’t have the key to get in.
