The Internet is the backbone of everything that happens in the world today, but nothing carries a greater threat of a mass outage than solar storms.A big enough solar storm today, referred to as a ‘solar superstorm’, can threaten this very backbone of the world. This is in addition to having an impact on the electrical grids, which has already been documented in the case of past solar storms that were truly massive in nature.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, an Indian scientist starts her research paper with this sentence, “Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the Corona virus pandemic, a recent black swan event. However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that poses a direct threat to Internet infrastructure. The research investigates the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe.
The internet today primarily uses fiber optic cables. However, these are mostly immune to solar storms since they carry light and not electric current. But, long haul cables use an accompanying conductor that connects repeaters in series along the length of cables called the power feeding line. According to a research paper published by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine and VMware Research, solar storms will impact this conductor and the world needs to sit up, take notice. More than that, they should prepare for any solar storm caused Internet apocalypse.
