Could there ever be a worldwide internet outage?

Whether it disrupts access at work or makes your favorite show buffer at its most suspenseful moment, the inconvenience of an unreliable internet connection is something we've all experienced. Large-scale outages over the years have served as reminders that the internet can also face more widespread issues and bring everyday tasks to a halt. But would it ever be possible for the entire internet, all across the world, to go down?

The internet is often called a "network of networks," including those linking devices across homes, businesses, public spaces and more. For the entire internet to go down, therefore, many pieces of infrastructure would need to be impacted within a short time.

"It is possible but would require significant resources and/or huge coincidences which makes it a highly unlikely, but possible, event," George Cybenko, a professor of engineering who specializes in information systems and theory at Dartmouth College, told Live Science in an email.

Quite a bit of "heterogeneity, randomness and distributed asynchronicity" were built into the internet from the start, so a whole-system failure is very unlikely and would be extremely difficult to cause, Cybenko said. "We have local networks as well, say within a home or a business, that could continue to function even if the global nature of the internet has failed," he explained.

When information is shared over the internet — for example, as a text message is sent from one smartphone to another — it is broken into small packets of information, each of which is routed through the quickest available path through the network. That means that, even if one of these routes is compromised, the message can still travel because it has a long list of alternatives, according to The Open University.

This design consideration alone protects the entire network from completely failing due to either physical damage — for example, if an undersea cable were cut or a large internet hub lost power — or software damage, whether caused by systems issues or hackers. Even when a large infrastructure provider, like Cloudflare, goes down, the disruption may last only a few hours and cannot spread to other providers or systems.

If a larger outage were to occur — for instance, from a powerful and unexpected solar storm — repairs could take time to resolve. However, many governments and large companies have plans for how to recover from a large internet outage and resume operations as quickly as possible, which often include tools like cloud storage systems and backup power generators, Cybenko said.

Conversely, some governments have shut off the internet in times of massive protests. This is accomplished by dismantling or destroying internet infrastructure like power grids and fiber optic cables, or throttling — intentionally limiting the processing speed of an internet connection via broadband providers, according to the World Economic Forum. But even those intentional outages can be resolved relatively quickly.

"It is surprising how rapidly people can recover [the internet] — it continues to befuddle people how resilient the internet is," William Dutton, a senior fellow and advisory board member at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Oxford's first professor of internet studies, told Live Science.

In the meantime, though, the impacts of such an outage could go much further than inconvenience. Critical infrastructure, such as hospital IT systems, often depend on the internet, and essential services, like power grids and traffic management, could be shut off indefinitely.

"The more central the internet becomes to so many different functions, from health care to even warfare, the more critical it is that it be secure and that it be reliable," Dutton said. "These kinds of outages and so forth are obviously concerning, even for short periods of time."

Since the internet's invention, fears have circulated that as it continues to expand, its foundations run the risk of being strained or overloaded. But Dutton said this is a common misconception.

"The more you add nodes and so forth, the internet actually becomes more resilient — growth actually makes it stronger rather than weaker," Dutton said. "It's certainly possible, but I doubt that it will collapse at all."