Up On the Roof…

We’ve had sporadic internet outages before. Gmail has been down for an hour or more, on occasion. Twitter has the famous “fail whale,” more often than we’d like, and certainly your ISP has been down too.

On these occasions there’s not much we can do about it. If its a connection problem and there’s an iPhone or Blackberry, we’re okay. If its a website or service, we have no choice but to wait. These are pretty isolated events that happen a few times during the year and in a few locations, but…

What if we had the Big One?

What if we had a large scale, full or multi-day, Internet blackout?

I know, its the Internet and there’s levels of redundancy. It was built by and for the military to avoid large scale outages, etc. What if they missed something? What if there’s a successful attack? The North Koreans and others are trying hard enough. About a year ago, a serious hole in DNS, was patched up by major ISPs, but before that we were oblivious to that shortcoming and other problems like that one may exist, in DNS or other places. Who knows for sure?

So no Facebook. No Twitter, No Google. No Gmail, No Yahoo. No Bing. No digital cable. No Skype. Nothing works, no way, no how.

What would happen? What would it be like? In your home, your neighborhood, city, state, country? What would the first seconds, minutes, hours be like for you?

Since I have an technology related job, I would be expected to fix the problem right away. Most of my family and even some people at work have no idea what I do–but they know that I have control over stuff online, and would assume I could do something. Only those with copper (traditional wire) phone lines, would be able to reach me, but that wouldn’t work, because I don’t have it on my end.

I can’t get past the first minutes or hour, but remember, be prepared, there would be no ATMs, no credit card processing, you’ll need cash to buy milk, etc…

So we go along not thinking about it, but if and when it happens what would you do? Post your thoughts in the comments below or post a tweet on Twitter using the hashtag #blackout.