"the internet" doesn't go down like there is some way it can globally be down. I work with international backbones with a teir one provider. We are one of the largest global backbones and from my experience I don't see this happening. However, I could think of a few ways that it could be greatly affected - primarily from something like a global affecting solar flare or something along those lines. Otherwise the redundancies in global peering and route adaptions to outages is very robust. Generally everything is done with extreme fault tolerances built in. Scale down a bit into ISPs and they also have their own redundancies and use different backbones intentionally. Scale that down into enterprise corporations and they also have multiple services to add another layer of redundancies. Now pull in satellite and other wireless technologies and even having different types of service for backups (fiber/cable/dsl) and its tough to see anything that would cause all of it to fail at the same time. Now, if everything starts moving to satellite services exclusively (which I don't see happening any time soon) then something like solar flare I could see affecting things on a wider scale. Sorry - fun topic, just trying to offer some perspective from a 25 year engineer/developer in the tier1 internet field... fun topic though :)
"the internet" doesn't go down like there is some way it can globally be down. I work with international backbones with a teir one provider. We are one of the largest global backbones and from my experience I don't see this happening. However, I could think of a few ways that it could be greatly affected - primarily from something like a global affecting solar flare or something along those lines. Otherwise the redundancies in global peering and route adaptions to outages is very robust. Generally everything is done with extreme fault tolerances built in. Scale down a bit into ISPs and they also have their own redundancies and use different backbones intentionally. Scale that down into enterprise corporations and they also have multiple services to add another layer of redundancies. Now pull in satellite and other wireless technologies and even having different types of service for backups (fiber/cable/dsl) and its tough to see anything that would cause all of it to fail at the same time. Now, if everything starts moving to satellite services exclusively (which I don't see happening any time soon) then something like solar flare I could see affecting things on a wider scale. Sorry - fun topic, just trying to offer some perspective from a 25 year engineer/developer in the tier1 internet field... fun topic though :)