Massive Solar Storms May Shutdown Internet Around The World, Fears Expert

Dated:-31 Aug 2021

Solar storms or coronal mass ejections are known to cause damage to electrical grids and cause blackouts, however, experts are of the belief that they could also adversely affect the internet infrastructure, causing a global internet outage. 

This was revealed by the University of California, Irvine’s Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference last week. She revealed, in her research, that even though local and regional internet infrastructure would be at low risk of damage during extreme solar storms as they mostly use fibre optic cables and are not affected by geomagnetically induced currents. Even short cable spans that are susceptible to these storms are grounded regularly, eliminating the possibility of damage. 

However, the same cannot be said for undersea cables that connect continents together. Even though most of these continents are connected via fibre optic cables, the repeaters that amplify the current at regular intervals are highly susceptible to failure, and if most of these repeaters on a network go offline, it could be enough to create an internet blackout in a particular nation that only relies on the internet coming from undersea cables.

The most recent solar storm that occurred in 1989 took down a Hydro-Quebec power grid causing a nine-hour power blackout in northeast Canada. And after seeing decades-long low-solar-storm activity, experts fear that we could soon be on the verge of experiencing another massive solar storm.