The 40-year-old system might be vulnerable to technical collapse or cyberattack, which could cause widespread chaos in fields from banking to health care to government.
When your Internet service goes down, it’s at best an inconvenience. If you rely on it for business, it can quickly cost you money. So imagine: What happens if the Internet breaks?
Picture people wandering the streets lost without GPS or maps on their iPhones, unable to pay for food or other goods with a simple swipe of a card.
Companies would have to resort to faxes and phone calls instead of e-mail; they’d quickly reach capacity and be unable to function. Credit cards wouldn’t work; stores and hospitals would run short of supplies. Even electrical power to our homes could be disrupted.
“It would be a mess,” said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for McAfee (MFE, news, msgs). “You would be taking businesses that were designed to do all their point-of-sale and financial transactions through the Internet and going back to pen and paper and taking checks in a car to the bank. People would lose their minds.”
Read more at Money Central MSN
What if the Internet breaks?
Porn shops will start trading again and prostitutes will have to go back on street corners.
This will probably lead to credit card companies collapsing.
well. one thing is for sure, the sale of dvds would go up – the amount of twilight fans with absolutely nothing to do would positively skyrocket..
Oh dear god, we might have to go outside and talk to real people! HahaHa! (but at least the corner shop would function).
The only way the internet could break would be if a mass virus got through every single server firewall, or there was a global powercut, for days (which would indicate something fairly worrying to be getting on with anyway). The internet isn’t one big thing, its millions of little things talking to each other, with the information dispersed accross those bits of machinery and physically stored on them. People would lose their minds??? I don’t think so, no more than happens when you watch tv repeatedy for long periods of time….
How awful. What ever did we do before?
I might as well be dead if the internet broke!
Except the internet wouldn’t break. Because the internet doesn’t exist. That is to say that the internet isn’t a thing that can just be shut off. What if one of Telia’s trunks across the Atlantic goes down, you say? Well then your traffic to the US suddenly starts to take a few milliseconds longer. The only things that could stop all forms of networked communications across the planet (which is what the internet actually is) are of such magnitude that banking, retail, etc would cease to matter and first aid and military pressure would be the only things on anyone’s mind. That said, we’d probably be totally powerless in those circumstances anyway. If someone/something has got the ability to “break the internet” then they most likely have just killed everyone on the planet in the process.
We would all just have to have one big orgy to take our minds off it.
We would all have facebook/twitter withdrawal symtoms aswell! What a horrible thought.
Why would the loss of the internet affect GPS?
I’d certainly lose my mind!
Oh man. I never realized just how dependent we were on the Internet. Kind of embarrassing when you think about it.
Oh, is that so? My …
We def. already realize this when the servers are down at our work … we can’t do a damn thing anymore then. For a short while at times not bad, but not for a too long period during the day … it sucks.
And that’s not even real life outside …
Let’s hope it will be a bit as with domino (as in domino day) …. when it does NOT go so well that is …..
Electricity failure will cause a similar situation ofcourse …
I remember what it was like pre-internet and sometimes I was far happier then. I’ve had so many bad experiences on the net what with one thing and another. BUT I’d now be completely lost without internet banking, shopping & Twitter/Facebook (although I don’t use the latter as much due to now being addicted the former!)
It’s become such a part of the world and our lives now, everyone & everything just cannot function without it.
LC x
Surely it is taking cheques in a car, not checks?
people often talk about the internet breaking, but wouldn’t it be amazing to see how the world could cope without electricity for 7 days? in the link posted above, it mentions that with the break of the internet people would then rely on fax/telephone etc…but the thought of no electricity always fascinates me. i’m unaware of the sound of electricity until the power actually cuts every now and again…
Society would tear itself apart like an angry child with a napkin?
I think the impact would be less than all that. People still write cheques, own maps, use faxes, etc.None of them have actually been rendered obsolete yet. They’re just a secondary method that people could go back to if required.
This is something I always ask to my customers when we do another project where the internet is the carrier.
Managers look awestruck and wave it away as a seeming impossibility, only when their internet line is down they start to see what I mean
Every “i” company needs a contingency plan when the internet (or part of) is down.
When I first asked myself that question I thought “oh dear, what if?” and kind of panicked at the thought of losing contact with so many people, listening to great music, convenient online-shopping etc., etc., etc.
Couldn’t even begin to imagine the chaos it would cause to the industrial world and the domino effect it would create if the internet broke, Iook at the chaos on the roads when we get a heavy snowfall in this country.
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear war, it grew out of – ARPANET – so I think it’s pretty resilient. And if there is a major nuclear war, getting online to view a bit of porn will be the least of our worries!
There was a South Park episode about this… It was horrible! :0
@ diavel – that was one of the best episodes