Comment on this story
It looks like the stuff of science fiction. Magnetic fields unleashed by a solar superstorm rip through Earth’s magnetosphere, sending currents through human infrastructure. The aurora borealis unusually fills southern skies with brilliant blues and greens. We look up from our phones and computers to see them, and the Internet as we know it flickers by.
Physically, most of us are fine. But in a matter of hours, we’re back to the analog age, where the only thing chirping is the bird outside our window.
The “internet apocalypse,” as it’s being called, has recently captured the imagination on social media, prompting the rapid spread of misinformation about non-existent NASA warnings and speculation about what hyper-online might do with themselves in an offline world. Apocalypse-mongers, redditors and religious doomsday writers have at some point seized on the idea.
And it’s easy to understand the intrigue. Virtually every aspect of human life is tied to the Internet, and its absence could have disastrous consequences, not to mention that many of us can barely endure a 30-second elevator ride without WiFi.
But drama aside, these worries aren’t entirely fiction. In fact, a widespread Internet outage could be caused by a severe solar storm hitting Earth, a rare but very real event that has yet to happen in the digital age, experts say. When a solar storm known as a Carrington event It was struck in 1859, telegraph lines exploded, operators were electrocuted, and the northern lights descended on latitudes as low as Jamaica. A solar storm of 1989 took out Quebec’s power grid for hours. And in 2012, just a storm he missed Earth.
As the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as “solar maximum” in 2025, some worry that our interconnected world will not be ready.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Irvine whose work “Solar Superstorms: Planning an Internet Apocalypse” has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about the resilience of the internet when the coronavirus started to spread and realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread Internet failures was scarce.
“We’ve never experienced one of the extreme cases and we don’t know how our infrastructure would respond,” Jyothi said. “Our crash tests don’t even include these scenarios.”
He notes that a strong solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure, such as undersea communication cables, which could disrupt long-distance connectivity. If you haven’t lost power, you may be able to access, say, a locally hosted government website, but it may not be possible to reach larger websites, which could have data stored everywhere.
Northern latitudes are also particularly vulnerable to solar storms, and this is where a lot of Internet infrastructure is concentrated. “This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today,” he said.
These outages could last for months, depending on the scale and time it takes to repair the damage. According to the Internet, the economic impact of a single day of loss of connectivity in the United States alone is estimated at more than $11 billion. observer NetBlocks.
Still, Jyothi says she felt bad for using the term “internet apocalypse” in her article. There is not much ordinary people can do to prepare for such a phenomenon; falls on governments and companies. And the paper “got too much attention,” he said.
“Researchers have been talking for a long time about how this could affect the power grid,” he notes, “but it doesn’t scare people as much for some reason.” Losing power also means losing internet, of course.
The recent online panic appears to have been sparked by the recent discoveries of the Parker solar probea NASA device launched in 2018 to investigate the physics of the sun and the solar atmosphere, not to keep WiFi from going out, as TikTok would have you think.
A few weeks ago, scientists published new probe evidence on the source of the solar winds, which they say are the result of a phenomenon called “magnetic reconnection”. Although the research did not specifically look at solar storms, it has broader relevance. The solar atmosphere changes very slowly, says Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and a NASA principal investigator working on the probe. So “whenever something is changing very fast magnetically in the sun, it’s probably due to reconnection.”
Coronal mass ejections, the ejections of plasma and magnetic fields that can fuel damaging solar storms, occur on a short timescale and are likely part of this mechanism, he said.
“The more we know about magnetic reconnection in the Sun,” Bale said, “the more predictive power it will give us for space weather.”
Speaking on a trip to Japan, Bale said he understands the kind of panic the idea of an “internet apocalypse” causes. “My wife has gone up to some town three hours from here. And the only way he knows the way back is with his phone, and we don’t have cash,” he said. “It could really be a disaster.”
But normally, Bale doesn’t worry too much about solar storms. “In a way, I prefer growing my own potatoes in the field, not using a cell phone,” he said.
