Massive coronal mass ejections from the sun occur so rarely that we have no comparative scale to give us an idea of what might happen to our civilization when it does happen.
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi from California University during the SIGCOMM 2021 conference gave a presentation under the meaningful title: "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse".
She presented the damage that magnetized solar particles can cause to the global Internet infrastructure.
Studies show that even if power returns within hours or days, planetary-scale Internet outages will continue. A solar storm can break submarine cables that connect the continents. This will cause a massive, long-term loss of connectivity.
Fortunately, local and regional internet infrastructure will survive, as the optical fiber itself is not adversely affected by geomagnetic storm currents. Short lengths of cables are also earthed very regularly.
The problem is that like never before in any known history, we are addicted to factors happening around the world. Perturbations in one place cause trouble in many others. Thus, even a brief but global failure of the Network can have dire consequences for economies and society.
Worse, such solar storms are inevitable and cannot be predicted long enough in advance.
So we don't know the day or the hour.
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