What Happens When The Internet Goes Down?

What if the internet didn’t come back after you restarted the router?

It’s pretty irritating when the problem is usually solved by switching the Wi-Fi off and on again and waiting for that orange light to turn green. But large-scale internet outages have happened before, and they can leave entire regions struggling to reconnect.

For places with limited connectivity and fewer alternative routes, losing one major connection can be a much bigger problem than being unable to scroll through TikTok for an afternoon. Internet access connects people to education, employment, healthcare, public services and communication; so when that connection disappears, the consequences can become far more worse than a bad Wi-Fi day.

We don’t really think about what keeps the internet running while we’re using it – underneath all those apps, websites and endless streams of videos is a huge physical network of cables, data centres and other infrastructure. But now what actually happens when it goes down?

What Happens When The Connection Fails?

The internet is made up of thousands of networks that connect to one another, with data constantly being directed along different routes. When one connection fails, traffic can often be sent another way; that’s one of the reasons a damaged cable doesn’t automatically mean everyone suddenly loses internet access.

A lot of the infrastructure behind the internet is actually sitting beneath the ocean, where submarine fibre-optic cables carry enormous amounts of data between continents without most of us ever having to think about them. The Internet Society says these cables carry more than 99% of intercontinental internet traffic; when one is damaged, the networks relying on it have to find another way to move that traffic.

Network operators can redirect traffic through other cables and land-based fibre routes, but those alternatives have limits. If a route normally carrying a certain amount of traffic suddenly has to take on much more, connections can become slower or unreliable even though people are still technically online.

You might still be able to send a message or open a website, but pages can take longer to load, online services can become unreliable and your banking app might suddenly decide that testing your patience is part of its job.

Why Are Some Outages Worse Than Others?

Having another cable somewhere only helps if that connection can actually take the extra traffic. Countries and regions with several submarine cables, cross-border fibre links and local internet exchanges are generally in a better position when one route fails.

The March 2024  Cloudfare and Reuters reported that the West African outage affected 13 African countries after four submarine cables were disrupted after a suspected underwater rock slide off Côte d’Ivoire. Some countries experienced worsening connectivity while Côte d’Ivoire almost had a total outage, even though there was another submarine cable still being operational in the country. The Internet Society said that countries with alternative submarine and cross-border fibre connections were better able to maintain connectivity.

Then, in May 2024, SEACOM and EASSy were damaged off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, reducing connectivity across several East African countries. No country suffered a whole internet outage, as other submarine cables, cross-border fibre links, internet exchanges and locally cached content helped keep some services running.

An alternative route doesn’t mean everything immediately goes back to normal. When a large amount of traffic is pushed onto a connection that wasn’t designed to handle all of it, congestion can still leave people with really slow internet and services that barely work.

What Would An Outage Feel Like?

An outage could be a little confusing at first because there wouldn’t necessarily be an obvious sign that something bigger is wrong. Your Wi-Fi could look completely normal while one website works, another refuses to load and an app you’ve been using all morning suddenly stops responding.

It might be tempting to blame your router, your phone or your internet provider first. If some things are still working, it’ll probably take some time to realise that the problem is actually somewhere else in the network.

Which probably means a few unnecessary router restarts before you realise this isn’t something you can fix from home.

The Internet Doesn’t Have One Big Off Switch

We have become very used to being able to fix things ourselves – if an app isn’t working, we close it, if the Wi-Fi is playing up, we restart the router and if our phone is being weird, we switch it off and on again.

The internet doesn’t really work like that; there isn’t one switch to flick or one thing to restart when something goes wrong. It’s a huge collection of networks all relying on each other, which is probably why an outage can be so difficult to understand from our side of the screen.