A Solar Storm

A massive Internet outage can be caused by a massive solar storm today. The Indian scientist says global infrastructure is very vulnerable to, what she called, solar superstorms. Therefore, the world must prepare itself for a destructive solar storm that can knock out the Internet across the world.

A solar storm has a massive potential for destruction, especially when it comes to electronics and infrastructure. So, any big enough solar storm today, would have a catastrophic impact on the global infrastructure that keeps our Internet running. However, if the digital infra is destroyed, it will bring the Internet down along with it. An Internet outage in this modern era will not only cause massive money loss, it would also cost many lives. 

The Internet is the backbone of everything that happens in the world today, but nothing carries a greater threat of a mass outage than solar storms. A big enough solar storm today, referred to as a 'solar superstorm', can threaten this very backbone. The world, as such, in unprepared for a solar storm-Internet linked apocalypse. This is in addition to having an impact on the electrical grids, which has already been documented in the case of past solar storms that were truly massive in nature.

Solar storm and the Internet: Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi starts her research paper with this sentence, "Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a recent black swan event. 

However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure. We investigate the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe."  READ MORE