We pride ourselves in saying that we live in the information age where anything we want to know about can be accessed in an instant and at the palm of our hands. The enabler for all that has been, of course, one of humanity’s greatest inventions i.e. internet.

Ever since the internet was first introduced to the world, it has change human life in one major way after the other such that we have had to evolve our ways of doing time and again and have had to get rid of several old ways that were made utterly obsolete.

This always connected lifestyle of ours was even more augmented with the introduction of portable devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets and today, we can order a cab at our location with a tap and send a text to a person half way around the globe in an instant.

Internet has truly permeated all aspects of human life and has today become a necessity rather than a luxury a couple decades ago. As such, I wonder what would happen if it stopped working for even a week!

Is It Even Possible?

The internet is a robust system and is not dependent on one single computer or even a single system that could be targeted to cause global internet outage. It is an interconnected system where if one section of the net doesn’t work, the other sections can keep functioning normally.

There are however ways where a large portion of the internet can be affected. For example in 2013, Google went down for only 5 minutes and that caused the internet traffic to drop by 40%! That’s huge.

But to truly cause a global outage is very difficult. Almost to a point of impossibility. Even concentrated cyberattacks won’t do the trick or even cutting the deep-sea cables that are responsible for a major portion of data transfers.

One of the only ways it could happen is by way of destructive, powerful solar waves capable of frying all systems that the internet relies on including even the satellites. The chances of that happening are slim, but it is still possible.

What The Impacts Will Be

We are so reliant on the internet today that an outage for a week would be catastrophic. When it happens, we will immediately notice it as we are no longer able to log on to our social media. As this information spreads, thanks to other means of communication, panic will start to set in.

As ATMs and banks would stop working, you would be limited to the amount of cash you have at that point to buy your essential items. This could cause panic at the food stores and other places as people rush to stock up on the bare essentials. We could see worldwide riots and governments using their resources to maintain order.

Businesses would take a major hit as people are no longer able to shop online and also because everything is conducted on the net like purchase orders, deliveries, inventory management, receiving and fulfilling of orders and so on. Sites like Google and Amazon would literally be obsolete for the period that the outage lasts.

Also, the stock market would get closed causing even more panic among traders. All this would be real bad news for the economy even if it lasted for just a week, because once internet services would be back up again, there would most likely be a crash in the stock market.

These are the big ones but there are a host of smaller services that we use in our day to day life that we have completely taken for granted and they would be rendered useless in the wake of such an event.

Take ordering a cab for example. Granted we would still be able to do that in a non-internet world, but it is that realisation of the lack of convenience that hits people more. That’s why, I think, more than the tangible effects, the psychological effects are greater and matter more.

I mean, when you open up your laptop one day and you see that there is no internet, the laptop itself starts to feel useless even though a lot can still be done with it. That comfort of being ‘connected’ with the rest of the world is taken away and that causes discomfort, boredom and if lasting for a longer period of time, stress and panic.

The scary part is that we do not have a Plan B for any such scenarios. I know the chances of this happening are remote but we should still be prepared if it ever happens because we are completely dependent on it and it is only going to get stronger in the future.