Areas affected by Swisscom's internet outage February 11th-12th 2020
Something vaguely out of the ordinary happened last night at about 11pm.
I was idly looking at videos of guitar amps on YouTube when a video failed to load. I did the usual things like quitting Safari, the web browser, and starting it again. That didn’t improve anything, so I resorted to Firefox but that wouldn’t work either. So, I shut down the Mac and restarted it. Still no dice. I couldn’t get my Mail to refresh either. Rapid diagnosis? I had no internet connection (although the icons on the Mac appeared to show that I did). If I had no internet connection, then the TV wouldn’t work either because it is also internet based. So, I turned it on. Amazingly, it did work for about 10 seconds (how come?) but then informed me that I had no internet connection and that I needed to switch the internet box upstairs off and on again. These things can happen; nothing to get very excited about. I did the necessary.
The internet box can take a while to run through all its configurations and start-up procedures, so I thought I would continue my web browsing by using my phone as a wi-fi hotspot, in other words, using the mobile network to stream the internet to my computer instead of the cable internet. But strangely, that didn’t work either. I should point out that I have the same supplier, Switzerland’s biggest, to supply my TV, landline, internet (all that is internet based) and mobile network. In this, I am like about 2/3 of the country. It now looked very much like a Swisscom problem, so I gave them a ring, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. I just got a recorded message saying that all their operators were busy (not that usual, I’d have thought, at 11pm) and that I should phone later. I wasn’t even put on hold. This confirmed my suspicions that they had a problem.
However, with no TV to look at and no internet of any description, it was impossible to divine the extent of the problem. Was it a Swisscom problem (seemed unlikely that it was purely a local one), a national problem, a European one, or even a global one? How could I find out? It was then that I passed the door of the bedroom where my wife had fallen asleep listening to the radio, which was still quietly on. It was broadcasting some sort of announcement that emergency services numbers (there are separate ones here for fire, police, ambulance, avalanches etc.) were no longer working in most of the country.
Ah.
I was wary of ringing up friends at 11:30 pm (as it now was) to ask them what was going on, if they knew, but I sent a speculative SMS to one to ask him. No answer, although the phone said it had been delivered and I knew that the mobile network was up as I had got through to Swisscom. I sent another one to a friend in England and got back a reply that all was normal there. No need to panic, then. Not a European-wide or global catastrophe.
I went to bed and read my book. That was the sum total of my discomfort.
At about a quarter past midnight, normal service was restored and I went to sleep. In fact, I already was asleep when I was woken up by my first friend replying to my SMS saying that everything was working again.
It also transpired that the various emergency services had tweeted mobile numbers to replace their normal emergency numbers. This would have been bugger-all use to me, as with no internet there was no Twitter, so I would have been none the wiser. I would have been able to watch my house burn down or suffer a cardiac arrest without any means to call for help. At least the third of the country with Salt or Sunrise connections might have been able to log on to Twitter (as you would, with flames coming out of your house) to find out if, on the off-chance, the emergency services had replaced 117 etc with some odd mobile number. It’s just the sort of reflex you’d have.
It got me thinking. Everything works on the internet now, which means that if the internet doesn’t work, nor does anything else. I’m lucky not to have an internet radio, so there is still some means of finding out potentially when the shit hits the fan. But suppose the mobile network went down too, you’d have to resort to face-to-face communication or carrier pigeon. No TV, no phone, no internet. Had the situation gone on until today, there would be no real point going to work. Our phones are internet-based and wouldn’t work, so the 100-odd people who ring us every day wouldn’t. Those that came into the shop wouldn’t be able to buy much as they would need cash to pay for it because electronic payment methods wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t be able to withdraw any cash as the bank machines wouldn’t work. They’d probably want to reserve their little cash for food or transport. In fact, the entire contents of our shop, its computers, phones and iPads, would be just useless junk in the event of a prolonged internet failure and no one would want to buy them. The technical department wouldn’t be able to diagnose faulty machines either without internet tools. But it wouldn’t just be us. No one would be able to work, apart from farmers and woodcutters.
All a bit doomsday scenario, you might think, but I’m not so sure. Our entire lives are now predicated on the internet working but sooner or later, it probably won’t. Why would it? What have humans ever built that has worked forever? Any system has a vulnerability and all sorts of supposedly invulnerable things have been shown to have fatal weaknesses, from Goliath to Achilles to the Titanic. The internet is not invulnerable; it is contained in physical cables which can suffer damage, or in large banks of machines that might suffer damage. What was actually required to bring down 65% of Switzerland’s internet last night? Not much probably – pull out a few wires here or there, throw a few switches and hey presto.
The internet cables that physically link the world
I saw the Chernobyl mini-series which seemed to imply that a handful of people in a dysfunctional team almost managed to make a large and densely populated swathe of Europe uninhabitable.
I suspect that with the internet we have put all our eggs in one basket and that that basket isn’t anything like as well-woven and dependable as we’d like to believe.
The irony that you can only read this thanks to a working internet is not lost on me.