There is an episode of The IT Crowd that explains how to do it.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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If states isolated their network infrastructure from other states, the essence of international network would be lost.
Each country would have their own intranet, like Kwangmyong in the DPRK.
Kill top level dns
But you could still connect with IP addresses and only the name resolution would get affected right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, good luck remember thousands of IPS.
Also, no, all modern websites depends on external resources based on names, all websites would be crippled.
With a sufficient amount of explosives everything is possible
So many ways, it's almost unbelievable that it still works
You can isolate the networks that are part of the Internet by switching off the submarine communication cables. They are considered a military asset by the countries and defended as such.
Internet access could be disabled in a couple of ways
- By ISPs
- By Cloud providers as more and more people are using them
- By government organisations
- etc.
But the whole concept of internet will carry on IMO. After all, its just a large LAN.
Technically it's a bunch of LANs that are connected to each other
A Wider and less Local LAN, if you will
Coronal Mass Ejection perhaps
Solar flairs are the sword of Damocles hanging over all the internet. Itβs only a matter of when the next https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
It may be a few decades away, or next week. But everyone will get a notice of two days that all online data and communications will be destroyed , or not available at all, for at least a year
Solar "flares", right?
Iβm pretty sure my subconscious meant to type it, for unknown reasons. And Iβm not going to change it. Maybe I want the internet to go out with style
πππ So it should!
We already had a Carrington event in May of 2024, so there won't be one in the near future. It happens every 50 years, and during a solar eclipse.
The internet is very resilient at this point.
You would probably need to drop a couple of nukes or orchestrate a combined strategic takeout of thousands of sites
Instructions unclear: nuked every city.
Chill, Gandhi.
Please be the chilling now, here today
Just mess with BGP announcements
It used to be possible as networks could advertise that they owned IP ranges that they didnβt actually own using BGP, which is whatβs used for high level routing. This is what China did around 2010 where they allegedly routed all the internet traffic in the world through China for like 10 minutes. I guess somebody could do that and then just drop every packet.
I expect thatβs not possible anymore though, but Iβve been out the game a while so I donβt know for sure.
That's an excellent idea! It's a pretty badly failed experiment.
It might die slowly if you take down all root dns servers and keep them off long enough.
Maybe if you disturb BGP between isp's enough
but I can't see how either can be done, it's quite resilliant
I mean I feel like it's kind of hard to define what "the internet" really is because it's so decentralized. Like if you cut all the undersea cables and split the internet into multiple parts, which part is the real internet?
And even if all the commercial ISPs went away, people could still connect their networks together through phone lines or mesh networking so it would be hard to say the internet was really gone
Yeah, just unplug your modem.
with traffic whitelists
Depends how you define "the Internet". But if couple of big tier1 carriers null route their BGP, the Internet becomes more or less unusable for large parts, especially now that most of it is synonymous to 5-6 large websites and SaaS providers.
Practically it is not possible in the vast majority of countries in the world.
I guess if there is no electrical power In the entire country..