New York: 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 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, taking down around one million sites. Some people didn’t get their email, and many web searches ended in frustration. Businesses lost clients and customers, but overall, the 1997 crash’s 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, affecting 100,000 people. Employees were locked out of their workstations, and local libraries were ordered to turn off all their devices. It took 10 weeks for most of the systems to come back online.
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 accidentally cut the cable while scavenging for copper, taking all 2.9 million Armenians offline. The woman was arrested but reportedly released soon after due to her advanced age.
The fibre-optic cables in backyards need protection from human interference, 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, causing outages. There’s a history of teeth marks on these ocean cables from sharks and other fish. Google reportedly wraps its underwater cables in a Kevlar-like material to stop ocean dwellers from biting through the internet.
In 2022, a quarter of Canada’s internet and phone service was knocked out due to a failure at Rogers Communications. Emergency services couldn’t accept phone calls, hospitals cancelled appointments, and businesses couldn’t process transactions. The Canadian R and B star, the Weeknd, had to postpone a concert. Some people faced dire consequences, such as a Toronto resident missing the bar exam due to the outage.
Disabling the internet is a common method for government censorship in both authoritarian regimes and stable democracies. Since 2016, there have been over 1,500 internet shutdowns by governments, militaries, and police forces. Bangladesh faced a near-total internet blackout in response to violent clashes between students and police, with at least 150 people killed in the clashes.
The potential for catastrophic internet failures is yet another consequence of “monopolistic forces” in the tech business, as noted by Casey Oppenheim, chief executive at Disconnect, a cybersecurity company. When so much depends on a single company, one wrong move can bring it all tumbling down. As governments take on antitrust issues, this is a concern that may need addressing.