If you haven’t heard of the Carrington event, I suggest you read it, but in 1859 there was a giant solar flare that, if passed now, would take us back to the stone age.
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But in a new study, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine warned that a solar storm could knock down the Internet for weeks, if not more. In the presentation titled “Solar Superstorms: Planning an Internet Apocalypse” it was found that local and regional Internet infrastructure could be hit, but they would be fine as long submarine cables are in jeopardy.
Because? The local and regional Internet infrastructure does not present a high risk because the optical fiber is not affected by geomagnetically induced currents; meanwhile, the short cable sections are grounded regularly. But instead, the submarine cables … would be out of order. The reason is that there are repeaters under the sea that connect the Internet cables, about 50-150 km away.
Repeaters amplify the optical signal, so that if there was a Carrington-style solar storm, the repeaters ’electronic interiors would get their ass kicked. If enough repeaters were affected, it would disable the entire submarine cable. This means that large chunks of the Internet would be out of service and we won’t know how bad it will be until it happens, maybe not even then, because most of the Internet wouldn’t work, so we wouldn’t be. able to read about the news.
Professor Abdu Jyothi concluded in her article: “A strong solar storm has the potential to cause a massive Internet outage. Paying attention to this threat and planning its defenses, as our preliminary effort in this paper, is critical to long-term Internet resilience.“.
Abdu Jyothi told WIRED before his talk: “What really made me think about this is that with the pandemic we saw that the world was not ready. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it happens with resilience on the Internet. Our infrastructure is not prepared for large-scale solar events. We have a very limited understanding of the extent of the damage“.
You can read more about this story here.