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Earlier this year, as COVID-19 began to dominate our lives, the world turned to the Internet. This sudden shift to distance learning, working from home, and families sheltering in place drove up online streaming demand, placing additional load on Internet application platforms like Zoom, Netflix, and educational tools such as Kahoot. There was also a dramatic traffic increase across supporting network providers.
Faced with the specter of millions of daily Zoom calls and endless hours of Netflix binging, many wondered if the Internet could handle the strain of such rapid traffic growth and increased latency. Would it cause a catastrophic failure of the Internet? Our answer then: not likely.
But were we right? As the world is now more than a month into mandatory lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, with anticipated growth in application platform usage, media consumption, and overall Internet traffic, we can now state:
“No – increased Internet usage will not cause a catastrophic Internet failure.”
As expected, the Internet has remained resilient. There is no single “Internet” to catastrophically fail, thanks to its foundational “network of networks” architecture.
This architecture means that many interconnected participants all have a role in keeping the Internet resilient: