Is the Internet in danger or crashing?

Question

If it is what would happen? Would it freeze, slow down or would some regions be denied access.

Answer 1

That's a bit like asking if the telephone system or electricity is about to crash.

I'm sure you're pretty familiar with one or other of those and how they work - lots of different places where the power comes from, wires between places, sections can blackout while others are fine... that's what the internet basically is.

Internet is short for "INTERconnected NETwork" and basically means lots of computers and related machines and cables going here there and everywhere.  So when people talk about the internet crashing, they're basically saying much the same as "could the whole electricity system in the world stop working?"

The biggest concern is viruses of the right kind being released that are capable of spreading right across every defence on the internet and knocking out computers in HUGE numbers.  Theoretically possible but it has to be done properly and if people have backed up as they are supposed to, also theoretically we should be able to get back up and running fairly rapidly by "rolling back" the systems in use.  Of course, if the virus was made well enough and sat there quietly for long enough, you'd have to go a long way back to get to "clean" systems that didn't have the virus hiding away.

That's basically where it's at.  So it most likely wouldn't be a case of regions denied access as without access because major providers are down.

Answer 2

the first answer is no.  if it crashes you just wouldn't be able to pull up any pages.  Since there are servers hosting all over the place, the likelihood of it crashing is very slim.  the closest you are going to get to a crash is if your isp goes down.  in that case it would start to get slow, freeze and all of that as it goes bad.  but most isp companies have fail safe solutions in place for that.  you could even have local failures like the dsl central box goes bad, or a satellite dish messes up.  but a total failure would mean it would all have to crash all over the world.  the only way that would happen is an electromagnetic pulse wave that sweeps over the whole world knocking out all electronics.    

Answer 3

If you google "google" the internets breaks!

Answer 4

not really contiualy being up dateted you should see the DNS servers they fill rooms and there are larger ones but only 13 of them round the world. besides if one server goes down you would be re routed through another as long as you are not directly conceted and only to the one that crashes besides most of these servers have very little software on them so nothing to crash there just BIG switching hubs. yes it can slow down if lots of people start using it, freeze for some maybe if you are still on dial up and yes if one server losses power every thing that depends on that sever would also lose the internet.

Have you seen termiator 3 when skynet becomes active and you see all the red lines across the wolud that is a rough map of the internet criss cross all over the place to let info travle in all directions

Answer 5

Very much doubt it. Capacity is being increased every day to take the load. Yes you are going to get breakdowns which will shut areas down.

Remember that fire at some newspaper in the States a few weeks ago that shut down massive areas because it was a server, but it was back up and running with 48 hours.

If my memory serves me correctly someone let a massive worm loose a few years back in the States that caused a few headaches for a time. But as the Internet has increased more safeguards have been put in so a problem in one area can be bypassed.

Total freeze or complete slow down, yes in its infancy. Today, no, will never happen!

Answer 6

The only problem I have heard of, concerning the running of the Internet, is the now massive use of youtube.  Because video takes up so much space, there are those who believe that use of this service will eventually lead to serious slow-down of the entire system.

Virgin, for example, are already installing fibre optic cable connections to hundreds of thousands [millions possibly] of homes and businesses across the UK.

Fibre Optics - How Stuff Works

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/fib...

Most of us, myself included, are using a single copper cable, a telephone line.  In my case, this was installed on my house back in c1937.  Back then all it had attached to it was a single telephone handset of the period with a dial.  All you could do then is either dial a local number or call the operator if you wanted to call another city or abroad.

That same single copper telephone wire now has to deal with massive amounts of information such as downloading and viewing video clips on youtube and all the rest of the stuff I look at - emails etc on the Internet.

So, to sum up, the Internet is probably going to have problems, including slow-down, if we carry on as we are.  More of us need to go to a cable connection, fibre optics if possible.  More junk can be put through a fibre optics connection than is ever possible via a single copper telephone wire of the 1930s.

Glenn Campbell - Wichita Lineman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qoymGCDY...

Answer 7

I don't think it is in danger of crashing. Some parts of it may crash or slow down from time to time but the Internet as a whole is quite resilient. There is redundancy built into the system. If one part of the system fails, another one kicks in and starts doing its work.