Im curious. Would it be possible to shut down the internet?

[Lufia Erim]

I'm serious, what would it take to wipe the internet off the earth? Not that i would want to mind, but I'm curious if anything short of an apocalyptic event would be able to take down the internet as we know it.

In a realistic scenerio, let's say someone had unlimited money and manpower, would it be possible?

Or is the internet here to stay?

 

[skywolfblue]

Yes. Nearly all Internet traffic is routed through a handful of big cities (New York, Chicago, etc). A government order or a virus could shut off all that traffic. Of course, it'll be up and running again eventually, are you looking for a permanent solution?

On the extreme measures end, an EMP from a nuclear blast in the upper atmosphere or solar flare would work. There have been solar flares in the past that would have fried all of our technology had they occurred today [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859]

 

[pookie101]

yes kill the 7 keyholders of the ICANN and steal their keys also taking out their servers.. when you enter a web address like wwww.escapistmagazine.com its looked up in the ICANN database and sends you to the right IP address. without those keyholders and keys the system breaks down in a few weeks even without the servers being taken out

you could also attack the physical cables connecting continents

as someone else mentioned EMP would work but would also bring countries right back to the stone age

 

[Catfood220]

Or if this were to happen.

 

[DarthCoercis]

Well... Australia completely lost access to the internet for a day or two a few years ago when a genius contractor cut through the outgoing lines. So I guess that yes is the answer to your question.

 

[Satinavian]

Yes, it is possible. But it would be up again in a week at most without any significant data loss.

 

[lionsprey]

the only way to shut it down for any length of time would be a worldwide EMP.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The net was originally designed to work if during a nuclear war, so shutting it down would be hard.

Now, making a massive mess, wrecking what we call "the net", sure. But there'd be some internet left.

 

[hermes]

No. Internet is built to be robust. Even an executive order would not shut down the Internet, but only separate a large portion of it from another portion of it (see China).

The WWW though, is less robust. Attacking the main DNS servers would disable most pages for a few hours/days, but it is nothing that can't be repaired, since they have backups distributed worldwide.

 

[Padwolf]

Yes, in a way. It wouldn't be easy to shut it down completely, and it would cause an absolute uproar, but it can be done! Would cause one hell of a backlash though.

 

[CaitSeith]

Not sure if there is a way to remove it completely; but there are several ways to cripple it severely or to make it inaccessible for the general audience.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

The only way I know that you can reliably destroy the entirety of the internet is through a quite big Solar Flare, like the one that missed us in 2012, IIRC.

So yeah, it's difficult to destroy it by yourself.