Users could suffer an “Internet apocalypse” due to solar storms

(Source: NASA Goddard)

New research presented at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communications conference warns that a severe solar storm could plunge the world into an “internet apocalypse,” where network connections would be down for weeks or months at a time.

“We are not fully prepared in terms of infrastructure for a solar event of this scale,” Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in a new research paper just published.

According to Ms. Abdu Jyothi, the rate of extreme solar storms that directly impact Earth is only 1.6%-12% per decade. Previously, only 2 such storms were recorded, in 1859 and 1921.

“Since then, humanity has become more dependent on the Internet. However, the impact of solar storms on Internet infrastructure has not been examined,” said Abdu Jyothi.

The good news is that local and regional Internet connections will suffer little damage because fiber optic cables are not affected by geomagnetically induced currents.

However, the long undersea Internet cables connecting continents are a different story.

These cables are equipped with repeaters to boost the optical signal, spaced about 50 to 150 km apart. These repeaters are very susceptible to geomagnetic currents. If one repeater fails, the entire cable can become useless. If a certain number of submarine cables are damaged in a particular area, communication between continents will be cut off.

Countries at higher latitudes - like the US or UK - are more vulnerable to the Sun's rays than countries at lower latitudes. If a solar storm occurs, it is likely that countries at higher latitudes will be the first to lose power.

It's hard to predict how long it will take to repair underwater cables, but Jyothi said widespread outages could last weeks to months.

Millions of people could lose their livelihoods if this happens.

“A one-day Internet outage in the United States could cost an estimated $7 billion or more,” Abdu Jyothi wrote in the article. “What if the Internet went down for days, or even months?”

To partly solve the problem, Abdu Jyothi said humans could lay more cables in low-latitude places, and develop tests for resilience to large-scale network failures.

Ms. Jyothi also added that if a potentially catastrophic solar storm were to strike, humanity would only have about 13 hours to prepare.

According to VNA