A disaster movie for the 21st century. Forget towering infernos and airplane disasters; what would you do if the internet closed down?

This week has seen both Google and Twitter suffer some down-time. From comments around the net one would be forgiven for thinking a pandemic had struck. So many people now depend on the internet that any interruption to normal service leads to widespread panic. Where did my emails go? Why is my profile down? What shall I do with myself if I can't chat online?

But what would you do if normal service didn't resume?

How would you get news? You could go out and buy a newspaper, except they've all closed down. You could read a book, except most bookshops have closed down too and you can't download anything onto your Kindle. You could write a few letters, buy some envelopes and stamps... and wait a few weeks for a reply. How many of your online "friends" can you actually contact offline? Close friends, are they? There's always the radio - that rarely goes down - except you've never bothered buying a digital radio and all the analogue stations have gone silent. TV! There's got to be something on television - except the cable companies have gone down too.

Well, you could go and talk to your neighbours; you're bound to bump into some of them as they aimlessly wander around thinking about what to do with themselves. The world has suddenly shrunk down to size.

But the internet is designed to withstand a nuclear war, isn't it? Well, the network is designed to reroute traffic if any part of it breaks. This does happen. One of the major internet backbones in Asia broke after an earthquake a couple of years ago and took a few months to get back to full speed as traffic was rerouted down slower connections such as satellites. Governments with firewalls protecting their populations from revolutionary ideas can easily plunge the whole net into darkness for their people. The internet doesn't need to be physically attacked for it to go down, just messing with its addressing protocols would mean that you couldn't link to any website. But what use is a postal network if there are no postal deliveries?

Of course, this will never happen... will it?!

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