Powerful solar flares can provoke Internet outages around
the world. This warning was made in her report at the
SIGCOMM 2021 conference by a US researcher Sangeeta
Abdu Jyoti, Associate Professor at the University of
California, Irvine. Despite the fact that the optical fiber
itself is not affected by geomagnetically induced flash
currents, the electronics of repeaters located every 50-100
kilometers are vulnerable to them. However, the risk will
differ for different cables. So, Southeast Asia will suffer
less: the Internet backbones are shorter there, and the solar
flare will cause more damage in high latitudes. Longer cables
connecting the US and Europe are at greatest risk. For local
and regional Internet infrastructure, the threat is minimal,
since the cables there are often grounded.
Solar flares accompanied by coronal ejections are the most
powerful transient phenomena in the solar system. Although
powerful solar flares are observed quite rarely, however,
after three decades of low solar activity, the likelihood that
such an event will occur very high!
