It’s a well-known – and probably false – meme that the Internet was originally designed to withstand a nuclear attack. But one would’ve thought it could withstand oh, say, an anchor?
Apparently not. This story of severe disruption of the Internet (and television and phone etc) connections in Middle East and Africa is all over the net (the working part) today. Okay, so the anchor-theory is just that – a theory – for now, but it’s plausible. Whatever the cause ends up being, it’s a sad fact that the Internet, which has stealthily grown to become a critical infrastructure that we depend on for a surprising amount of things and yet take for granted, can’t withstand one stupid cable being cut.
One can sort of understand that a water supply is somewhat vulnerable if water from a sewer is pumped to the network directly at the source after cleaning (incredibly, such idiocy happened in the town of Nokia in Finland) since the water network has to be somewhat centralized for source sanitation purposes. But it’s always amazing to see that the world of electronic commerce and most of our modern-world communication hangs, quite literally, by a (fiber-optic) thread.
Many large companies have dedicated “overlay” networks and even guaranteed-bandwidth links connecting their offices. But what good does a VPN tunnel do if it goes – as it would most likely do – over the same underseas cable as the other traffic? Short of Google, I haven’t heard many companies building their own physical backup networks. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about that?
I also wonder when some terrorist group decides that bombs are too much hassle, gets their hands on some bottom-trawling equipment and goes fishing in some choice locations..
