How Resilient is the Internet?

On October 4th, 2021, Facebook—including its subsidiaries Instagram and Whatsapp, and its authentication system used by many other companies, including Spotify and Doordash—was unavailable for hours. This system outage provided us with a glimpse of vulnerabilities that have been developing in the internet’s ever-shifting architecture over the past few decades. The phrase “the move to the cloud” is often used to refer to how the Internet has changed in recent years, but this pleasingly vague metaphor papers over a worrisome reality.

Systems as large as Facebook’s shutting down should make us concerned about the resiliency of the internet in general. When Whatsapp goes down, so does access to the only means of communication for many people in many countries. When Instagram goes down, so does the primary channel for sales and marketing for many small businesses across the world.

Between its internet access programs in developing countries and its platforms that span social, business, and community needs, the scale and scope of services offered by Facebook is now similar in functionality and criticality to those offered by the major cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The way in which so much of our online interaction now depends on a few centralized platforms has made all of us vulnerable to organizational, political, or infrastructure deficiencies that each of the companies in this small set will likely come to face, sooner or later.

This state of affairs, in which most of us depend on a layer cake of centralized service providers, is a far cry from the original design intentions of the internet’s first form as the Arpanet project, funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency and Department of Defense in the late 1960s. 

According to computer scientist David Clark, who has been involved with internet design and governance since the days of Arpanet, the following principles existed for the system’s architecture from the outset:

1. Internet communication must continue despite loss of networks or gateways. 
2. The Internet must support multiple types of communications service. 
3. The Internet architecture must accommodate a variety of networks. 
4. The Internet architecture must permit distributed management of its resources. 
5. The Internet architecture must be cost effective.
6. The Internet architecture must permit host attachment with a low level of effort. 
7. The resources used in the internet architecture must be accountable. 

From The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Protocols 

In the internet’s current state, point number five from David’s list seems to have superseded all other considerations for the internet’s functionality. To support increased demand for large-scale online services and high processing loads, the internet’s underlying architecture has been consolidating among a few large platform companies that can provide economies of scale and unbeatable low prices through their services.