Internet outages happen all the time. Most of these networks can run independent for a time. And are designed to be so. Only smaller networks have issues because they are not designed as such. But things like toast make a small store feasible to run. If electricity goes out then it has bigger issues, but I’ve seen stores go to hand swipe cards before to keep from closing.
Comment on What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 5 days ago
So much of our infrastructure uses the internet now that if it goes down I wouldn’t be shocked if electric grids, healthcare, shopping, public transport, etc also shit the bed.
titanicx@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
0x0@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
I wonder if that fancy bed company that saw it’s beds freeze 'cos no AWS ever sold to hospitals…
massacre@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I can only speak for the US, but our electric grids and production are supposed to be air gapped for critical infrastructure. Healthcare? I doubt it based on the continuous leaks there - and medical supply chains are tightly integrated with internet/cloud… Shopping still has a fairly sizeable local accessibility for staple items, certainly food distro where the internet wouldn’t matter for at least a short while, but it’s also tightly integrated for Supply Chain Management, much like Health care - so there could be a run on it.
I’m not sure on public transport, but most are goverment led, so probably air gapped.
There’s also a shitton of dark fiber laying about. Internet infrastructure COULD be brought back up depending on the damage that triggered outages in the first place.
LePoisson@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Literally all the ordering for stores uses the internet now; we’d be absolutely fucked for a good while if the internet actually went down in the USA.
0x0@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
I can only speak for the US, but our electric grids and production are supposed to be air gapped for critical infrastructure.
Do oil pipelines count? 'Cos Colonial got hacked and everybody thought they were airgapped.
I think some water facility was too but no serious values were changed - 'cos and admin preferred to sit comfy at home.massacre@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’m not exactly standing behind it - just saying what I’ve read. I’m confident nuclear plants are after 9/11. Anything else is probably hit or miss, including petro/gas pipelines, coal, and generating plants specifically. Plus if a bad actor (likely state sanctioned) decides to, they can get through air gaps with spies/traitors/unwitting idiots with a simple USB drive. After air gapped uranium processing centrifuges were wrecked with an errant USB drive, I would expect all systems to disable or remove USB drive connectivity, but I’m sure that’s inconsistent… at best.
0x0@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
After air gapped uranium processing centrifuges were wrecked with an errant USB drive,
I’d forgotten about stuxnet, quite the (technical) feat.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Add some batteries to the meshtatic nodes. and even if all electricity and networks go down, you and your friends can still organize and plan.