Is the Internet getting sick from the Coronavirus?

Employers and schools encourage work-study-from-home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. With concerns growing over the spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus, schools and businesses around the world are implementing contingency plans that encourage distance learning and work from home. Usage of e-learning, messaging, and videoconferencing tools is also growing rapidly, placing additional load on these Internet-based applications and platforms and generating additional traffic. And with more people staying at home, online media consumption is poised to increase as well. My daughter goes to University of Florida (UF) and was recently informed that professors are implementing remote learning for all students. This trend will only increase as the virus spreads across the world.

Not to worry

— Rick Romano

So not to worry, a catastrophic failure of the Internet is not likely.

Major Internet infrastructure providers should be able to absorb the increase in traffic and bandwidth demands, especially if the growth is gradual over a period of days, weeks, or months. Cloud infrastructure hosts should also have sufficient additional compute, storage, and bandwidth capacity to enable their customers, including the e-learning, messaging, and videoconferencing tool providers, to scale their systems as necessary. In order to keep traffic local, content delivery infrastructure from companies including Amazon, Akamai, Cloudflare, Google, Netflix, and Apple is deployed in many last-mile networks.

The Heart of the Internet

Fundamentally, the Internet relies on independent networks connecting to one another all around the world and, all together, these form the global Internet. This is the heart of the Internet way of networking; however, in part because of its distributed nature, measuring any aspect of the Internet on a global scale is difficult. Expert researchers know where to find specialist data sources and analysis but more casually interested observers, such as policymakers or journalists, have no reliable place to find answers to questions about the current state of the Internet. In short, there is no single site or tool that brings together the multiple measures required to understand the Internet’s evolution and health. Although, there is a good indicator of the State of the Internet on Pingdom called Solarwinds that shows live stats of outages Worldwide.

Increase in Worldwide Internet use will impact speed

— Rick Romano

The virus has its origins in China’s Wuhan city

But that being said, as the coronavirus spreads to developed countries that are more connected to technology, one can surmise that increases in Internet use will impact speed and access to the overall world network.

What else is impacting the Internet, China is now squelching information about the coronavirus and its origins. Chinese President Xi Jinping built up what many consider to be the world’s most sophisticated censorship machine to control public debate. Now that system is being put to the test as authorities try to dictate the narrative around the viral outbreak appearing across the country.

The virus has its origins in China’s Wuhan city and was thought to be spread through human consumption of pangolins, prized for Asian food and medicine. But unusual fact is the only biological research facility in China is located in Wuhan and this is the same facility that was responsible for releasing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) two infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades but that have been managed. A government-run lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, could have been researching military applications for the coronavirus and may have been the source of the outbreak. This and other conspiracy theories have surfaced and has cause and effect on the Internet as China fights to control the information leaking to the world community.

Don't Panic!

Public safety and panic are major concerns for the health and wellbeing of the internet. As long as real information is available and government controls are in place to address the outbreak there is no real concern about losing Internet access anytime soon.

Bottom-line the Internet is Happy and Health today and for the foreseeable future.

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