Reference number: CH000085

Is it possible to crash or shutdown the entire Internet?

Question:

Is it possible to crash or shutdown the entire Internet?

Answer:

No. The Internet as a whole is a collection of multiple different networks controlled and maintained by multiple people, businesses, and governments and has been designed to be redundant, which means even if one portion of the network goes down users should still be able to get to their destination in most cases.

It is still possible for the Internet to experience outages often caused by major events such as wide power outages and earthquakes. When large outages occur a large portion of the Internet may be affected. However, will not cause the complete Internet to shutdown or crash. For example, in early 2007 Asia experienced a series of earthquakes that damaged undersea cables that caused wide Internet and phone related issues.

Additional information:

• See our Internet dictionary definition for additional information about this term as well as related information and terms.