Clicks creek Up

‘INTERNET AT RISK OF DEVASTATING CRASH’

THE internet could collapse “any day” from a perfect storm of cyber attacks, server crashes and natural disasters, scientists warn.

They fear the trio of risks may create a domino effect and wipe out the high-speed web.

Corinne Cath-speth, from Oxford Internet Institute, said: “We tend to forget the fact that the internet works on a day-to-day basis is close to a miracle.

“We think of it as this ephemeral thing – we literally talk about clouds. But clouds are servers, they are things you can kick – big humming machines.

“It takes so many individuals to run, it takes all these autonomous networks.

“Things go wrong all the time, but we as consumers are so used to a frictionless experience.”

Her colleagues fear if the world doesn’t immediately increase investment in security and back-ups for the web’s huge servers it is headed for a “much worse” internet blackout than last week’s outage. A single IT customer was blamed for crashing the globe’s top websites last Tuesday – including Amazon and the UK government’s – by updating their settings on cloud provider Fastly.

The top three content delivery networks – Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services and Akamai – have all suffered faults since 2010.

Data centres, undersea cables, telecoms networks and third-party software providers are also feared to be open to outages.