The Butterfly effect/rev X

The real doomsday event internet experts still worry about is a sudden, snowballing error in the decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy

The net, a vast interconnected colossus built by volunteers and based on open source code for the most part, is robust from the chaotic side of things but exceedingly fragile due to antiquated infrastructure just waiting for the big one. Channeling the Butterfly effect/Chaos theory is apt as small events can lead to catastrophic disasters. Consider one day before a pond freezes over.,50% is ice free, one day later, as long as the temp's below 32, the entire surface becomes covered by ice. 

As can be seen from the graph, even the slightest difference in initial values
causes significant changes after about 12 seconds of evolution in the three cases.
This is an example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

And this.

It can be seen that mixing occurs as we progress in iterations.
The sixth iteration shows that the points
are almost completely scattered in the phase space.

It is the morning after the internet went offline and, as much as you would like to think you would be delighted, you are likely to be wondering what to do.

You could buy groceries with a chequebook, if you have one. Call into work with the landline – if yours is still connected. After that, you could drive to the shop, as long as you still know how to navigate without 5G.

A glitch at a datacentre in the US state of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The internet may have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is also a web of creaking legacy programs and physical infrastructure, leading some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.

These would be bad. But the real doomsday event, the kind that the world’s few internet experts still worry about in private Slack groups, is slightly different – a sudden, snowballing error in the creaky, decades-old protocols that underlie the whole internet. Think of the plumbing that directs the flow of connection, or the address books that allow one machine to locate another.

We’ll call it “the big one” and if it were to happen then at the very least, you would need your chequebook.

The big one could start when a summertime tornado cruises through the town of Council Bluffs, Iowa, laying waste to a low-slung cluster of datacentres that are an integral part of Google’s offering.

This area, called us-central1, is a Google datacentre cluster, critical to its Cloud Platform as well as YouTube and Gmail – a 2019 outage here downed these services across the US and Europe.

Concentration of a few giant players generates the fragility, not the code.

But there is “absolutely a lot of concentration happening on the internet”, says Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London. “This happens with economics. It’s just cheaper to run all things in the same place.

Which means when one obscure component of a giant entity like Amazon craps out,
the web vapor locks for real.

The Butterfly Effect aka A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = ⁠8/3

There is no certitude.