Shutdows

[Potatoman]

Would it be possible to shut the internet down all over the world, say for security reasons?

[Sylday]

It probably wouldn't be possible to shut down the whole system; but if some major players - like Google, Yahoo, AOL, BT etc - agreed to pull their respective plugs, it would create quite a big hole in the network.

[WoWo]

I was talking to an Internet Expert the other day (Simon Bisson) and he said that if AOL went down the Internet would grind to a halt (due to the amount of caching they do). It would be possible to do such a thing but there are so many things involved it would be practically impossible.

[jenstar]

You could physically close down the routing servers. It would depend on who owns them, really.

[stevie21]

AOL can do all the caching that they want - I would dearly love it if they "went down". How can it be possible for me to rely on AOL to visit unrelated websites like this? As mentioned, (IMO) the best bet would be to knock out the routers rather than the servers.