Our world as we know it has been split into two. There is the real world; the ostensible universe for which we have the five senses to experience, and the digital world, where we’ve shoved all of our menial and unwanted tasks to get them out of our way.
Our banking, mail, shopping, and more have all been relegated to this online parallel universe, simply for the sake of de-complicating our lives one errand at a time.
But what happens when the internet goes off? What if it just goes away one day? This is something that Russia has been preparing for.
Russia managed to disconnect itself from the global internet during tests in June and July, the RBC daily reports, citing documents from the working group tasked with improving Russia’s internet security.
Russia adopted legislation, known as the “sovereign internet” law, in late 2019 that seeks to shield the country from being cut off from foreign infrastructure in answer to what Russia called the “aggressive nature” of the United States’ cyber security strategy.
The legislation caused consternation among free speech activists, who feared the move would strengthen government oversight of cyberspace.
Now, just weeks later…
A widespread disruption caused severe outages for some of the world’s biggest websites on Thursday afternoon – and it was all caused by a software update gone horribly wrong.
DownDetector.com showed a sharp and simultaneous spike in outage reports for prominent travel, retail, financial and gaming websites globally. In most cases, the spike in outage reports appeared to start around 11:40 a.m. ET.
Even the Tokyo Olympics website and app were reported to be intermittently down, just hours before the Opening Ceremony.
The outage was later traced to a service provider issue, and remedied within a few hours…but not before some began to wonder just what Russia had been preparing for just a few weeks ago.
