Internet goes down, everything goes down…
[…]
Besides the Internet, the outage caused major disruption to television and phone services, creating chaos for the UAE’s public and private sectors.
[…]
The outage heavily crippled Dubai’s business section, which is heavily reliant on electronic means for billions of dollars’ worth of transactions daily.
[Source: CNN]
And all around the Middle East and beyond as well:
Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 per cent of the country’s internet network was down on Wednesday.
India was also affected, losing more than half its bandwidth initially.
Residents of Gulf Arab countries reported a slowdown in internet connectivity and disruption of services…
[Source: Al Jazeera]
This is what’s so scary about technology; we quickly get so used to it, we integrate it into our everyday lives and work, we become dependent on it for everything we do, and then when it fails for one reason or another our lives stop, we’re left crippled and helpless; we can’t go back and we can’t move forward; we just have to wait for things to be sorted out so we can go back to life as usual.
We’re too dependent on technology, and we don’t have a fail-safe plan; a major technological meltdown in the future could bring the whole world to a stand-still; and blow us back centuries into the past.
“Dad, the power’s off–there’s no Internet!”
“Pity.”
“There’s nothing to do! What’s this?”
“A book by Mr. Charles Dickens–“A Tale of Two Cities.”
“It’s…big.”
“He was paid by the word–five cents, I think. It starts getting good around page 160. Now let me show you how to light a kerosene lamp.”
Come on. Centuries into the past? You have to be kidding. We’ve only had the internet as we know it for a good 12 years. If the internet came crashing down we would have to revert back to handwritten letters, postal mail, and trading paper stocks.
Grab a book and get a life.
@startup tunisie: Yep, it’s clear there’s a lot of money to be lost.
@Janissary: lol…
@Matt: Well, I wasn’t talking about right now, I was talking about the future, when we get even more dependent on technology.
Anyway, if we look at the now, if there were to be a technological meltdown, do you think it’d be that easy to go back to where we were just before the technologies we’re so dependent on appeared?
We’ve gotten so dependent on them with our data centralized on the internet and on several different servers, with all our transactions taking place on inter-connected networks, …etc.
A meltdown would mean the loss of all that data, and not only the loss of a means.
MMM,
You’re right–the more interdependent essential systems become the greater the impact upon life of a cascade failure. The more advanced the technology of those systems, the quicker the failure and the more profound is affects upon all our lives.
Well, following that profundity, I’m off to bail a student out of the drug detox facility. (Yes, the tall blond kid.) As we leave that unhappy place, I’ll observe to him that it’s located next to a funeral chapel and ask if that’s his intended final goal. Maybe today he’ll be listening? 🙁