Chronicle the Second · On the Great Silence

What Happens If the Internet Goes Down?

Subjects ask me: sire, could the internet simply stop? Subject, I have watched it stop. No meteor, no war. One engineer, one configuration change, and half the web went dark before lunch. He pressed a button, and the world held a small unplanned festival of despair.

Can the whole internet actually die?

Almost certainly not, and the King says this with genuine regret, for it would be dramatic and he owns the wardrobe for it. The internet was built by people who expected pieces of it to fail, so it has no single heart to stop. It is less a machine and more a squabbling federation of networks, and you cannot behead a federation. The court has looked into it.

What dies instead is whichever large piece you personally depend on, always on a weekday, always because of something small. In 2021 one customer changed one setting at one delivery company and took the great news sites down before the kettles had boiled. Later that year a social empire erased itself from the internet's map for hours and reportedly locked its own staff out of their buildings, which the King maintains is the funniest thing infrastructure has ever done. In 2022 an entire nation's network fell over and took the card payments with it. The internet did not end. It merely demonstrated who was holding whom.

The annual rehearsal

The court rehearses the Great Silence every year, and every year the findings are the same. The candles are lit. The board games are fetched. Within forty minutes the young princes are holding a paper map sideways and asking where the blue dot is. There is no blue dot, my princes. You are the blue dot. It is a difficult day for everyone.

By the second hour the tills of the realm have gone quiet, for money is now a rumour that requires connectivity. The telephone that rides the internet is silent; the ancient one on the wall works perfectly and nobody can remember whom to call on it. And the smart home reveals its true nature: the bulbs cannot decide what colour bereavement is, the thermostat sulks at an unexplained nineteen degrees, and the fridge, cut off from its yoghurt sponsor, keeps things cold in bitter silence, exactly as its ancestors did, and somehow resentfully.

The learned keep a short dull scroll for such days: a little cash in the house, the important numbers on paper, the maps downloaded while the downloading is good. They read it aloud at each rehearsal. It has never once received applause, and it has never once failed. This is the entire relationship between wisdom and entertainment, subject, and the reason your King runs a comedy site about it.

The royal contingency

The court, naturally, has gone further. The ancients left us a true scroll, RFC 1149, which with a straight face describes how to transmit internet packets by carrier pigeon. It was written as a jest. The King does not acknowledge jests in official standards. The royal loft therefore maintains forty pigeons at combat readiness. Throughput is appalling. Packet loss is a hawk. Morale has never been higher.

After the last drill, in which a pigeon named Gateway delivered one four-hundredth of a cat picture in nine hours, the court reached its official conclusion: the internet cannot truly die while pigeons live. The learned have asked the King to stop saying this at conferences. The pigeons have asked for nothing, which is why they outrank the learned.

The internet is not one candle to be blown out, subject. It is ten thousand candles, and every week somebody's row goes dark. When yours does, light the real candles, fetch the board games, and watch the smart bulbs learn humility. The Silence always ends. The princes still cannot fold the map.