Brewing Solar Superstorms Could Cause Internet Meltdown; Experts Say World Is Unprepared

Scientists predict that the next super solarstorms could cause a global internet apocalypse and fear the world is not prepared enough to resolve it.

The threat of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused people to retreat to the comfort of their homes and has allowed them to find solace in video games, online shopping and social media, among others. But, another menace could disrupt this new kind of normalcy humanity has recently afforded.

The impending threat was revealed at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference last week by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California in a presentation titled "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse." In the research, the expert highlighted that even if the power outage caused by the solar superstorm could be fixed in hours or days, massive internet outages will persist.

In an interview with Wired, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi shared the study is about the story of humanity being completely unprepared for something of significant importance. "What really got me thinking about this is that with the pandemic, we saw how unprepared the world was. There was no protocol to deal with it effectively, and it’s the same with internet resilience," the lead author of the research said.

"Our infrastructure is not prepared for a large-scale solar event. We have very limited understanding of what the extent of the damage would be," the expert pointed out. Is the world really not prepared for a massive internet outage?

In May, Dominic Cummings, former principal advisor to the U.K. prime minister, revealed that while the U.K. has plans, they are "completely hopeless." He also noted that solar storms could create a far "worse situation than Covid."

Experts discovered the impending solar superstorms could cause less damage to local and regional internet infrastructure because they are made of optical fiber, which is resilient to geomagnetically induced currents. These cables are also grounded regularly.

However, long undersea cables that link continents are at greater risk. A solar storm that could disrupt these cables could cut the connectivity of various countries from the source.

That's not all. A massive solar superstorm could also knock out equipment that orbits the Earth, which enables various services such as global positioning and satellite internet.

High-energy particles from the solar superstorm would gather toward the Earth's poles, which places areas in higher latitudes at a greater risk. Unfortunately, this is where the majority of internet infrastructure and undersea cables are located.

If destructive solar superstorms happen, North America could suffer from prolonged internet outages since it heavily depends on longer cables. The research predicted that while Europe and America could become disconnected, the equatorial hub in Singapore that links countries in Asia would be less likely affected.

Internet outages cost a lot of money. It is estimated to cost approximately $7.2 billion per day to the U.S. economy. Previously recorded severe solar storm events that caused problems are the ones that occurred in 1859, 1921 and 1989.

The 1859 event caused compass needles to swing uncontrollably while the most recent event in 1989 caused a nine-hour power outage in northeast Canada when it took down a Hydro-Quebec power grid.