Since its quasi-official birthday on January 1, 1983, the internet has never been turned off. We've had fairly large outages, most recently the Crowd- Strike debacle on July 19 that paralysed airports, banks, and whole governments, but it's never been entirely offline. But we shouldn’t tacitly assume that a total global outage is completely impossible.

If you missed the CrowdStrike incident, here's a quick primer. CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company whose services are used by huge organisations around the world to secure hundreds of millions of computing devices – everything from desktop computers to devices embedded inside industrial machinery. Think of it like antivirus except it's constantly updated by a centrally controlled system that detects threats and patches systems almost in real-time.