London: In a world where a single point of failure can throw our machines into chaos, everything from sharks to authoritarian governments and old ladies have brought the web to its knees. It is a reminder of just how fragile the internet services that our lives rely upon can be. Millions of users woke on Monday 20 October to find their favourite apps, gaming sites, online banking and internet tools were not available. The problem is thought to have been caused by an error with a database service provided by Amazon Web Services, which is the online retailer's cloud computing division.
According to BBC, Amazon Web Services provides online computing infrastructure for millions of large companies' websites and platforms. The outage affected the hugely popular games Roblox, Fortnite, and Pokémon Go, the social media platform Snapchat, productivity tools Slack and Monday.com, along with dozens of banks.
One of the earliest major outages came in 1997 thanks to a glitch at the company Network Solutions Inc., one of the main registrars that issues domain names for websites. A misconfigured database crashed every single website ending in .com or .net. It took down around one million sites, which at that point in history was a huge portion of the web. Some people didn't get their email. An untold number of web searches ended in frustration. Some businesses who couldn't reach clients and customers lost business around the 1997 crash, but overall, the problems were minimal.
Yet with the internet now touching nearly every part of our daily lives, anything close to the Network Solutions outage has far greater consequences. Twenty-one years later, for example, a malware attack on the Alaskan community of Matanuska-Susitna took an array of digital services offline. The internet blackout sent 100,000 people back in time. "The cyber-attack, God help us, just about stopped everything, you know," local Helen Munoz told the BBC in 2019.
Sometimes the problems start in the physical world. For a while, the entire nation of Armenia's internet connectivity depended on a single fibre-optic cable running through Georgia. In 2011, a 75-year-old woman took all 2.9 million Armenians offline when she sliced through that cable with a spade near the Georgian village of Ksani. The woman, who was scavenging for copper at the time, was arrested but reportedly let go soon after because of her advanced age.
Others felt its absence more keenly. "You can feel it when you don't have access to the internet. You start going crazy," says Vahan Hovsepyan, senior community and public policy advisor at RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, who lives in Armenia.
The fibre-optic cables in our backyards need protection from human beings, but the thousands of kilometres worth of cables draped across the ocean floor face their own dangers. Sharks have a mysterious fondness for biting undersea cables, which has caused outages in the past. There's a long history of teeth marks on these ocean cables, not just from sharks but other fish and barracudas.
A quarter of Canada's internet and phone service was knocked out in 2022 because of a failure at Rogers Communications, one of the country's biggest telecom providers. It gave 11 million people a preview of July 2024's CrowdStrike debacle. Emergency services couldn't accept phone calls, hospitals cancelled appointments, and businesses across the country couldn't accept debit card transactions. Canadian R and B star the Weeknd was forced to postpone a concert.
Legislators can prevent these kinds of problems by mandating safety measures in the technology and telecom industries, Kotak says. But sometimes, governments are responsible for internet shutdowns in the first place. Disabling the internet is also a go-to method for government censorship, both for authoritarian governments and stable democracies.
India is probably the world leader in using internet shutdowns to quell unrest, but it's a widespread tactic that's been deployed in at least 83 countries including Iran, Russia, Algeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Venezuela, according to Access Now.
In places where the internet connection depends on one fibre-optic cable, it makes for a glaring Achilles heel. After decades of the internet worming its way into every corner of our lives through wires and WiFi connections, you might think there would be more built-in fail-safes to keep the world churning. But largely the opposite is true, according to Casey Oppenheim, chief executive at Disconnect, a cybersecurity company.
The most famous internet failure in history is one that didn't really happen. Twenty-five years ago, the public went into a frenzy over the Y2K Bug. Many predicted that the dawn of the new millennium in the year 2000 would come with a global computer failure. Thanks to short-sighted engineers, many computer programmes relied on calendars that used two digits for the year instead of four.
CrowdStrike is the closest we've come to a full-blown internet shutdown. Even with its unprecedented scale, however, the consequences lasted just a few days. CrowdStrike was a taste of what's possible. Security experts are still bracing for the big one.