Internet could collapse in ‘domino-effect’ any day due to cyber attacks, claims expert

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.

The richest person in the world has the so-called ‘miracle’ of the internet functioning on a daily basis to thank.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has reclaimed the title from Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault.

The departing Amazon chief executive now has a net worth of £136.8 billion ($193.5 billion), according to estimates, surpassing Bernard Arnault’s estimated £136.3 billion ($192.9 billion) worth.