The Day the Internet Died.
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June 8, 2021. A normal morning. Then suddenly, the world goes dark. Not one site, not one platform. Half the internet disappears: Amazon down, Reddit unreachable, The New York Times silent, the BBC offline. Even the UK government can’t get its website to load.
It all starts with a bad update, a bug inside a company almost nobody had ever heard of: Fastly. A Content Delivery Network, a CDN. In plain words: the invisible systems that move data around the world at high speed. You don’t see them, you don’t talk about them, but without them the internet doesn’t work.
And yet one single misconfiguration brings it all crashing down. Within seconds, the biggest websites on Earth vanish. For a full hour, the digital world stops. To some it looks like a small inconvenience: you can’t read the paper, you can’t shop online. But behind the scenes, it’s much bigger. Airlines can’t sell tickets, supermarkets can’t update inventory, government systems can’t communicate. Real life freezes.
The story is clear: there is no single, free, public “Internet.” There are private infrastructures, and a tiny handful of companies hold the critical nodes. Fastly is just one. Add Cloudflare, add Akamai. Three names that keep the world online. But nobody elected them, nobody really oversees them. They answer to boards of directors, not to governments.
Fastly’s blackout lasted an hour, but that hour was enough to reveal the truth. The internet is fragile, not resilient, not democratic. It’s a web of private nodes, and when one falls, everything falls.
The rhetoric we were sold, that the internet is free, invulnerable, horizontal, was a myth. The network is privatized, concentrated, and we live on top of it as if it were eternal. But a single bug proved otherwise.
The real problem isn’t the incident. Incidents happen. The problem is the model. We’ve built our entire civilization on infrastructure we don’t control. Healthcare, schools, finance, politics. Everything depends on private servers. There’s no guarantee of continuity, no sovereignty at all.
Think about it. If a one-hour outage could paralyze newspapers, governments, and corporations, what happens if it lasts a whole day? Or a week? A targeted attack could make that happen, and we don’t need science fiction to imagine it. Back in 2016 the Dyn attack showed it clearly: hundreds of thousands of infected webcams and fridges took down Twitter, Netflix, CNN, PayPal. That wasn’t a movie. It was reality.
Here’s the truth: the internet isn’t ours. It doesn’t belong to us. It’s controlled by a handful of private companies with zero obligations to the public. Next time, it may not take just an hour to fix it.
When the internet dies, it doesn’t just die once. We die with it.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC
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