How long can the internet run without upkeep?

comradebunny said:

I want to know how long the internet would stay active if no one was maintaining it. The setting is a zombie apocalypse.

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Parts of it would stay alive as long as there is power to the backbone MAPs and DNS servers, which are housed in data centers all over the world. Any computers that can still connect to a functional part of the infrastructure will be able to connect to any other computer that can.

Over time, servers and routers would start to fail (some within days, some might run without problems for months), and more and more segments of the network would become inaccessible. But as long as there is still power, some parts of the network would still be up, though you may wind up with very isolated segments of connectivity.

The main problem would be a loss of the power grid. Without electricity the internet would go down.

As far as the electrical grid, it's a little dependant on the area, but I wouldn't expect it to last more than a day or two. Less if some of the power plants are damaged. We saw a few years back what happens to the grid when one power plant goes offline, complete shut-down of the eastern seaboard.

I just read a zombie apocalypse novel written in the form of blog posts--clearly the internets wouldn't last long, but for the purposes of the book the author made up an emergency US-Army wireless internet network available in certain patches nationwide. If you think about it for too long it's ridiculous (like what powers it, and where is the blog hosted, and how is the search engine hosted, and how can data pass through large areas without electricity)...but then not that much more ridiculous than zombies. In context I thought it worked...and the book would not have been as cool without the blog element.

Drachen Jager said:

We saw a few years back what happens to the grid when one power plant goes offline, complete shut-down of the eastern seaboard.

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Catastrophic shutdowns usually occur under high load when one element shutting down transfers power draw to other heavily loaded segments which cause them to shut down. In a zombie apocalypse, the power load is likely to be lower than normal and if it's a relatively orderly apocalypse I would expect the engineers to shut down large sections of the grid in order to protect areas where humans have fled to; which is potentially interesting because they might accidentally shut down power to routers that the Internet relies on.

After that, the power stations that require regular human interaction will probably go first, while nukes and hydro could keep running for quite a while. I seem to remember a guy from the Hoover Dam interviewed on TV one time saying that it could produce power for years before catastrophic failures due to lack of maintenance.

So we'd return to a time when amateur or ham radio operators reigned supreme for disseminating information in a time of emergency.

(They're still around, btw, and in any apocalytpic tale, don't forget about them.)

This calls for posting this link:

http://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people

There is an amazing story in "Wastelands Stories of the Apocalypse" called when Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. I can't remember the apocalyptic thing that happened, but it was about all the sysadmins trying to keep the servers up. I would think that would be an interesting source for you - at least a jumping off point for research.

Plus, that whole book was amazing.

Available to read online in many places, like here for instance: http://www.baens-universe.com/articles/When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth

So what you folks are saying is: In the event of an apocalypse, get on the internet immediately and google 'how to build and operate a ham radio'

Got it. *Makes a note for tomorrow, in case that crazy religious prediction is right for once*

And it only takes once...

comradebunny said:

I want to know how long the internet would stay active if no one was maintaining it. The setting is a zombie apocalypse.

Click to expand...

It won't.

Major network routing centers on the data backbone have security procedures that require live humans to follow certain authentication processes at regular intervals of less than 24 hours.

Just watching what the L. Quake in '94 did was revelatory, from a network ops standard.