PUSULURI GOWTHAM

Solar storms have a massive potential for destruction, especially when it comes to electronics and infrastructure. So, any big enough solar storm today would have a catastrophic impact on the global infrastructure that keeps our Internet running. However, if the digital infra is destroyed, it will bring the Internet down. An Internet outage in this modern era will not only cause massive money loss, but it would also cost many lives. The Internet is the backbone of everything that happens in the world today, but nothing carries a greater threat of a mass outage than solar storms. A big enough solar storm today, referred to as a 'solar superstorm,' can threaten this very backbone of the world. This is in addition to impacting the electrical grids, which has already been documented in the case of past solar storms that were truly massive in nature. Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi starts her research paper with this sentence, "Black swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives. The Internet has played a key role in helping us deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a recent black swan event. However, Internet researchers and operators are mostly blind to another black swan event that directly threatens Internet infrastructure. We investigate the impact of solar superstorms that can potentially cause large-scale Internet outages covering the entire globe."