Recently there have been a number of internet outages which have caused issues for people around the world.
As more and more people and organisations become more and more dependent on the internet to connect them to other people, organisations and services this becomes even more critical.
If you cannot access your bank then you cannot make payments, if your company cannot order parts from its suppliers then it cannot continue to operate.
In the future more things will rely on internet connectivity, autonomous vehicles, robotic surgery, robotic farming and more and more Just In Time (JIT) company processes. Many will still work offline but they will be all but useless with only basic functionality.
There are many reasons why the internet breaks, sometimes its very local and just involves your personal computer or maybe your companies computers, this is often just a cyber attack. Sometimes it will effect a large part of the internet and this is can be a security issue or when a maintenance patch gone wrong amongst other reasons. The more complex the solutions we implement generally the more ways it can go wrong or be exploited.
We see state actors attacking our infrastructure in order to test our resilience as in the event of conflict bringing down a countries internet will be a major objective along with other internet related attacks.
Large organisations and services have their own private pathways between their systems and to the internet and these are quite secure and are generally only affected by maintenance issues however at some point their will need to be communication between their systems and the outside world and that is where the problems begin.
So what can be done, most large scale companies have some level of redundancy and mitigation for when things break but most smaller enterprises do not and when Larger companies outsource to smaller companies they become vulnerable.
The security and recovery technology keeps improving but as technology in general advances its hard to keep up.
As individuals we can go into survivalist status, i.e. keep some cash handy and tins of beans stashed under the bed but not many of us will do that and in any case cash is becoming less useful and you can only eat so many beans.
During the second world war the Germans and Italians realised that the undersea cables used by the UK to communicate with its allies were crucial and made every attempt to cut these cables. These cables were the internet of the day and there is no doubt that in a future conflict the internet will play almost certainly a bigger role than any weapon or missile.