A British journalist described the recent outage of the social networking platform "Facebook" as a wake-up call, because the world of the Internet on which we rely so much seemed more fragile than we thought.

And people wondered what would take a company the size of Facebook off the Internet.

Is it a state cyber attack, or a similar heinous act?

So asked British journalist and author James Ball in his article in The Sunday Times.

The writer answers that question by saying that what happened was actually a normal thing, as someone somewhere messed with some basic settings and made a change in them.

loss of service

The result of this was that one of the technology companies stopped the service for “a full quarter of a day”, but the reality is that the Internet is more fragile than we think and it is a cause for concern, given that we manage our affairs today via the Internet, starting with banking and shopping, using e-mail, and sending and not ending with it. .

And malfunctions hit Facebook applications again a few days after a wide outage in its platforms - especially WhatsApp - last Monday for about 6 hours, which the platform management attributed to an error in the settings that cost it billions of dollars in losses.

However, the greatest weaknesses of the Internet - according to Paul - lie in the ordinary things that happen in the real world. In fact, people depend in the conduct of their worldly affairs on submarine cables that extend hundreds of thousands of miles across continents and countries, to encircle the world with an Internet network.

There is a myth that sharks gnaw those cables from time to time, but it is the fishing boats that pose the greatest danger to them, as they tore them while fishing.

And the Internet - in Paul's opinion - is flexible enough, making it able to recover from these sporadic accidents, companies use boats to retrieve faulty cables from the seabed and repair them, but if many cables are broken at one time, this means that the Internet - and all services The ones you depend on will be gone for days or even weeks at a time.

danger from outside

The writer goes on to say that there is another great danger that comes from outside the planet, not from the invasion of extraterrestrials, but from the sun.

Every few decades, the Sun throws out unusually strong flares toward Earth that are gigantic outbursts of magnetic energy.

These solar flares - as the Sunday Times article confirms - are unpredictable, or not regular phenomena, which means that they may strike the Earth at any moment without warning.

And the magnetic storm caused by any solar flare does not pose a danger to humans, but it may wreak havoc in electronic devices, and may topple satellites, and may lead to the crash of the Global Positioning System “GPS” (GPS), and damage to the main components in the cables. Dumped long distances in the deep sea.

However, the damage will not be caused to the fibers themselves, but rather to the electronics used to strengthen the signal transmitted through the cables, and this means that the Internet service may operate within a country, but each country may become isolated from its neighbors and other continents.

The author of the article recounted how a Pakistani Internet service provider once tried to ban the publication of a single video on YouTube, removing the entire site from more than half the world, while a small Nigerian company redirected most of the global bids to Google search engine (Google) through China.