Massive solar storm may hit Earth, likely to cause Internet meltdown

Another solar storm is coming which could potentially destroy the infrastructure and cause an ‘internet apocalypse’.

According to a new research paper published by Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine, and VMware Research, if this massive upcoming solar storm does happen then it can cause an internet blackout and will transform our digital world completely.

In her research, Abdu Jyothi revealed that local and regional internet infrastructure would be at low risk of damage during extreme solar storms as they mostly use fiber optic. Notably, the University of California, Irvine’s Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi said this at the SIGCOMM 2021 data communication conference last week.

It is important to note that for the undersea cables that connect continents, things are dangerous even if most of them are connected via fibre optic cables because the repeaters that amplify the current at regular intervals are highly susceptible to failure and hence pose a risk during a solar storm.

Research suggests that if these repeaters on a network go offline, it could be enough to create an internet blackout for those who rely only on the internet coming from undersea cables.

For those who are unaware, before this, severe solar storms were last recorded and had occurred back in 1859, 1921, and the most recent one in 1989. The solar storm that occurred in 1989 took down a Hydro-Quebec power grid causing a nine-hour power blackout in northeast Canada.

In her rsearch paper, Abdu Jyothi also warned about us being underprepared to face any consequences if another solar storm strikes the Earth.