How robust is the 'Net?

Global terrorism is a perpetual talking point at the moment - and for good and very obvious reasons.

I don't wish in any way to downplay the seriousness of these actions - far from it - but I can't help thinking that so far we've been incredibly lucky. Let me explain:

This country is incredibly IT dependent. Everything we do centres around computers and their interconnecting networks one way or another. Of late this generally means "the Internet".

Having browsed through my favourite on-line rag The Register, it appears to me it's frighteningly easy to upset a datacentre. Take Level3 for example. Some random thieves broke into their switching centre at the end of October and nicked some of the interface cards from their core routers, kicking their customers off the net.

The same thing has happened to EasyNet.

RedBus and Telehouse have had huge outages affecting hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of people simply due to mains power failures. Level3 managed the same by forgetting to fill their generators with diesel!

BlueYonder and Telewest managed to vanish off the face of the 'Net simply due to a failed core router.

FastHosts - home to thousands and thousands of sites and business systems - went offline completely when a single fibre was severed.

So instead of these comparitively minor failures, what would happen if there was a coordinated strike against these colo and switching centres? "That was one of the original design goals of the ARPAnet! It was designed to withstand such an attack!" I hear you say. Yes, it was. But it was also the case that there were multiple, lightly-loaded redundant links in place that could accept the traffic from one or more downed links with relative ease.

Nowadays in the era of cost-effectiveness and maximum efficiency, it's usually "redundancy be damned! We need to get more money from our assets!" As a result, the major networks are heavily loaded at the best of times. Take out a few key interconnection points in a manner that would make it physically difficult to reconnect everything and you have a very severe problem...

I don't even pretend to know how an issue like this can be addressed. For all I know, it may well have been, but from a simple trawl over an IT news site, it's quite disturbing how a router failure here and a fibre break there can bring entire networks in a flas - and hundreds of company IT systems with them!

Is it just me, or does anyone else find this just ever so slightly disconcerting?