How can the internet go down on a whole?

Question

Im thinking of writing a horror novel, but not a contained one. In this story it's world wide.My question is, with everyone in hiding or dead or on the move to stay alive, would the internet still be up? We always see the characters trying to catch the radio or news on TV, but they're down, but the way things are run these days I wonder if the internet would still be operational. What about those who use satellite uplinks to connect and not hard lines, would they still be online even if those with hardlines went down?

Answer 1

The nature of the internet is to maintain a connection even if one node (aka location) has been disabled. Because the internet is a net there are many routes for one computer to communicate with another. But all these computer require maintenance so on the scale of a few months yes the internet would prob stay up if there was power. But on the scale of years it would eventually die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

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