Sun To Reach Solar Maximum In 2 Years, May Lead To "Internet Apocalypse"

There has been a renewed interest in the solar cycles of the Sun as it sends out solar storms, sometimes so devastating that they could snap all communication on the Earth. According to Washington Post, the Sun will reach "solar maximum" - a particularly active period - in 2025 and today's digital world is not prepared for it. Terms like "internet apocalypse" have caught the attention of social media users, which led to a barrage of misinformation and unsubstantiated warnings from American space agency NASA.

The agency has not yet commented on the possibility of the end of the internet being caused by the 2025 solar storm.

But people started discussing what the "always online" tribe will do if such an event takes place? But it is just a hype? The Post says these concerns are not entirely fiction.

A strong solar storm could hit Earth - a rare event that has not happened in the interconnected world so far - causing widespread internet outage. It mentioned the Carrington Event in 1859 due to which the telegraph lines sparked and operators were electrocuted, as well as the 1989 solar storm that took out the Quebec power grid for hours.

"We've never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don't know how our infrastructure would respond to it. Our failure testing doesn't even include such scenarios," Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science professor at University of California at Irvine, told the Post.

Her paper 'Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse' played a key role in popularising the term.

Ms Jyothi said that a severe solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure such as undersea communication cables that could interrupt long-distance connectivity.

Such outages could last for months, said the outlet, adding that the economic impact of just one day of lost connectivity in the US alone is estimated to be more than $11 billion.

On July 4, as the US celebrated its Independence Day, the Sun held its own firework display. Space weather physicist Tamitha Skov shared a video of solar storm, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), captured by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) that orbits the Sun.