“People can no longer post selfies and can no longer shit,” is how the Interior Minister initially assesses the sudden power failure. He’ll have to correct himself soon, the series blackout turn off the lights all over Europe – for weeks. And it quickly becomes clear that a power failure can have dire consequences.
It wasn’t that long ago that there was really six hours of silence. Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, so loved by many – all offline at the beginning of October, “server unavailable”. All the more excitement on the rest of the Internet: The hashtag #facebookdown was trending on Twitter, users shared memes about failure, and a hint of the end of the world wafted through the World Wide Web.
What if the rest of the internet went down too? How likely is that actually? “The best way to turn off the Internet for more than a few hours,” says Scott Borg of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit, “would be to attack the power supply.” Borg runs the think tank in Washington with the nice-sounding name.
“Serious IT experts worry little about a complete internet failure”
But Borg also says: If the electricity goes out for a longer period of time, the loss of the Internet is certainly not the biggest problem. He and his colleagues study how supply chains, financial transactions and critical infrastructure would behave if such a blackout took place. After about eight to ten days, they estimate, a large part of the economy would no longer function, and hospitals would also be affected. The good news: this scenario is extremely unlikely. “Serious IT experts worry little about a complete Internet failure,” says Borg.
Partial failures that can happen on two levels are entirely realistic: In the hardware area, for example if submarine cables are damaged by a fishing boat. And in the area of software like on Facebook on October 5th. The group explained the malfunction at the time with a configuration error. Matthias Wählisch is particularly concerned about the software, because in his opinion the probability of failures increases here. The professor for Internet technology at the Free University of Berlin speaks of “human errors”, he believes that fewer and fewer developers understand the increasing complexity of the Internet. “Sometimes software solutions are brought onto the market – if you did this, you wouldn’t get a degree.” Recently, Wählisch looked at the internet connection of his smart heater. “Adventurous,” he thought, what he saw there.
Selectively, users want more digital education: The first step, he says, is “to make yourself aware of the dependency”. The problem is monopoly. That means: Anyone who handles everything – communication, finances, navigation and professional matters – via the platforms of a single company such as Google, for whom a partial failure can turn into a total failure. Anyone who knows alternatives is less affected in the event of a failure, says Wählisch. Incidentally, the professor of internet technology has developed his own protection mechanism: He doesn’t even use a smartphone.