Is it possible to shut down the entire internet?

Question

Is it possible to shut down whole internet? Shut it off completely. Where is it all controlled from?

Answer 1

Its not controlled from a single place so not really.

Answer 2

no it is not unless you have the doomsday device, you have to get all companies to agree to switch off at the same time. Do an IT course to find out.

Answer 3

The internet is not controlled from just one place! However there are ways in which it could be crashed on an international basis.

In america they have a building which is fed from three different power supplies, has a backup generator and very high security. If this building ever lost power it would crash most of the comercial websites including this one probably.

But there are other ways to terrorise the internet too, one example might be to use google advertising. If a script was placed into their ad codes it has the potential to shut down computers all over the world as lots of websites use these advertising codes.

Not that I promote any of the above! Hope this answers your question though.

Answer 4

no one owns the Internet so it is hard to shut down.

Answer 5

Well yeah You can if you can go to your control panel and go to add or remove programs and find the internet browser on the list that you use and delete but if you have more then one internet browser delete them all.

Answer 6

This webpage more or less answers your question.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/who-ow...

Basically, the internet can't be shut off, because no one company has complete control over it.

Answer 7

The internet is not a single entity controlled in any one specific place. It is called the internet because it is a NETwork of parts that are INTERconnected. Think of a fishing net. If you cut one strand of the net, the whole thing doesn't fall apart, you just have one hole, a piece that isn't connected to the rest. All the internet is is computers talking to eachoter. Have two computers, have them talk, you have an internet. Now, there are billions of computers out there, you take one offline, and that one computer disappears from the internet, but you still have one billion minus one to disconnect before the whole internet is shut off. The computers that are running the websites you see are not (or at least hardly) any different than the computer you're running right now. Yahoo is just one of a billion computers on the internet that your computer can talk to.

Answer 8

Well, sorta.

If you let off a strong enough electromagnetic pulse (courtesy of the 'Dark Angel' series) in several strategically chosen locations around the world at once, then maybe.

But unlikely, as they would likely be shielded.

A virus that assigns random numbers to information so that it can't be accessed properly would shut down the net, especially if they had to fix the error.

But please don't destroy the net, it's so good!