So what happens when the internet vanishes? E-Mail, connection to cloud services, search, Whatsapp - it happened about 77 times in 2019
When all else fails there is ham radio... but seriously it is a point to ponder as we become more and more reliant on the Internet itself. Smaller businesses especially are ditching dedicated datalines for general connection over the Internet even for local connectivity to cloud services.
Digital rights group Access Now says: "It seems more and more countries are learning from one another and implementing the nuclear option of internet shutdowns to silence critics, or perpetrate other human rights violations with no oversight." It's important therefore especially in these countries that citizens do not use the large centrally hosted foreign Internet social media.
The risk is not so much accidental outages as its true that there are multiple redundant links, and breakages mostly affect gamers and response times rather than breaking services. The growing risk in many countries is the deliberate shut-down by their own governments mostly in the 3rd world countries. But 1st world countries have been known to do localised shut-downs to quell serious protects.
Russia is probably the only country that has tested the continuation of its in-country Internet services whilst cut-off from external DNS and other services (China works that way permanently, so they are probably least affected). So if country "X" decides it needs to cut off its Internet externally in future for whatever reason, such an action could well paralyse its own internal services. If their government is using Whatsapp for communications (based in USA), that also goes down the tubes and is dead. In some cases a particular centralised service gets blacked out (eg. Whatsapp, Twitter or Facebook).
It suggests to me more and more you must not lose your localised capabilities, you need to have access to your business data within your country, you want to ensure also you have two or three social networks that you have access to (even better if they are peer-to-peer or decentralised such as Scuttlebutt, Diaspora or Mastodon as these have no single domain to be blocked). I recently heard from someone in China who could talk about the Coronavirus as he was connecting out via Scuttlebutt.
So I'm mirroring my e-mail onsite again instead of just using GMail via webaccess and my next step is to look at firing up my e-mail via my own domain name and hosting service, so even if Google goes out of business my e-mail continues. A domain name is not expensive and as long as you renew it annually, you own it, and can move it to any hosting provider without changing your e-mail or website address.
See What happens when the internet vanishes?
During a troublesome protest or tricky election, some countries just cut the online cord.
source https://gadgeteer.co.za/so-what-happens-when-internet-vanishes-e-mail-connection-cloud-services-search-whatsapp-it-happened
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