How to actually break the internet

Turns out you don’t need the oily backside of Kim Kardashian to break the internet. Just some scuba gear and a giant pair cable-cutters.

In this hugely insightful video, SciShow’s Hank Green reveals that the internet isn’t as invulnerable as we thought, with one of its most fragile points found in the massive stretch of cables which run across the ocean floor - essentially the reason you’re reading this right now.

However, built with shark-proof casing, you’d need something sturdier than the incisors of a great white to actually break it. And even then, this act might only knock out a single town or city; you’d need a whole team of globally scattered mischief makers plumbing the depths to achieve total chaos.

Not that this is the only way you can bring the World Wide Web to its digital knees…

You’re a microcosm in its destruction already - one of the web’s major problems lies in old routers, originally built to redirect packets of data from one network to another and only capable of holding so much data. Which is why, in August 2014, many of these registered a memory overload and stopped working, leading to a brief tech blackout in many parts of the world.

According to Green, the subsequent patches have only bought us a bit of time and it’s likely to happen again soon. And if that doesn’t do it, you can always take matters into your own hands.

But please don’t. We quite like our jobs.

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