Both a lot of information, and not a lot of information travels through those cables.
It’s going to depend a lot on where you live.
If you’re in North America, the vast majority of the services and websites you access will be hosted on the continent and will continue working just fine. Webpages for European companies may become inaccessible.
If you’re in Australia, some local stuff will continue working, but a lot more things will die.
Services like Netflix almost always have local servers, it’s not financially reasonable to push that much video between continents on a per user basis. They just use those links to sync their various servers as new content is released.
Most phone calls to foreign countries will fail. Almost all of it passes through the internet cables these days, rather than using dedicated phone lines undersea.
The largest providers use CDNs to serve content, which are designed to be redundant and resilient. Cloudflare alone has 335 datacenters on all inhabited continents. Services that don’t need to talk to a single centralised server would be fine.
You are forgetting that those data centres talk to each other using those cables in order to actually have a local copy that they send to the end user.
This caching behaviour will cease to exist if there is no internet connection between the centres.
Nice try, Putin.
I have a feeling we’re going to find out in the next five years.
I’m sure a lot of things would go wrong.
But for an internet perspective there’s a protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that would attempt to heal all the broken routes by rerouting through what’s not broken. A bit of an oversimplification but if everything goes right the internet will continue to work.
That’s quite a rosy outlook.
If this is accurate, 97% of global internet data is carried through undersea cables.
Satellite systems for general, consumer (non military) internet purposes do exist, but their total bandwidth is essentially negligible in this scenario.
What would happen is:
First, everything on the internet would dramatically slow down and/or 404 due to built in auto timeout failures.
As BGP kicks in, this may lessen very slightly, but systems that mirror data across servers on different continents would basically be unable to synchronize.
Systems with servers in only one location would basically be unnaccessible to anyone more than … ballpark, a few hundred miles away.
International banking and transactions and would be forced to stop, otherwise they’d be getting massively out of date info, wrecking the legitimacy of their balance sheets.
International video calls stop working.
International voice only calls and email may work, but with great delay for emails, and a roulette wheel spin for your call going through and being intelligble and not dropping.
You’re basically looking at the Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, maybe not quite as bad in certain areas that effectively prioritize certain kinds of traffic and rapidly enact effective mitigation strategies…
But best case, for probably a very long time, you’re looking at an internet that is mostly fragmented and highly geographically localized.
… and thats assuming the world’s highly globalized and interdependent economy doesn’t just collapse and never really come back.
Almost all modern logistics is now impossible, and almost all modern logistics runs on the Just In Time paradigm… ot is very fragile, very reliant on things working on time, with very little margin of error and stored emergency reserves.
Remember when the Evergrande EDIT:(lol wrong name) Ever Given blocked the Suez, and this caused logistics nightmares around the world that persisted for years?
Imagine that multiplied by about 10,000 or 100,000.
Satellite internet may be slow, but there’s a good chance a lot of traffic could get routed through it.
It would really only separate the Americas from Europe/Africa/Asia
Massive internet leaks.
It’ll take months of volunteer work to remove the Internet stuck from penguins and baby seals
