Once all the cash is depleted from ATMs, though, things will get a bit more nebulous. (Though, if everyone panics, it may resemble that bank scene in It’s a Wonderful Life!) So, as long as they have power, getting your cash out while the internet is down wouldn’t be a huge issue. While some banks, such as Wells Fargo, are trying out card-free ATM services using your smartphone, most ATMs around the country are still operating the same way they have for more than 50 years. Additionally, anything you have set up to pay electronically wouldn’t go through if the internet went down on the day it was scheduled. With the internet down, you wouldn’t be able to use any of your financial apps, so you’d have to show up at the bank to make any transactions - unless you use an online bank, in which case all banking transactions would be sidelined. The rise of mobile banking makes sense for consumers: Why waste your lunch break standing in line to deposit a check when you can do it any time of day electronically? But what other parts of the banking industry rely on the internet, and how could they be affected by an internet shutdown? A 2018 Bankrate survey found that 63% of smartphone users have at least one financial app on their phone and the 2018 Citi Mobile Banking study revealed that mobile banking apps are one of the top three used by Americans. When it comes to finances, more and more people are going digital. Take a look at some institutions that may or may not be affected by the internet going out for a day. Today, we’d see more than just pagers going offline. He examined the impact of this day in his book, Access Denied in the Information Age.
This is what happened when people lost the use of pagers for a day, way back in the pager era.”ĭutton is referring to the Great Pager Blackout of 1998 when a Galaxy 4 satellite fell out of orbit taking 80% of pagers and beepers in America offline. Take the plumber who has no office or secretary, but only a smartphone to set up and conduct business,” Dutton said. “Those who would suffer would be workers, who increasingly depend on digital networks for their work. and around the world, that rely on the internet for day-to-day functions would be crippled. However, blue-collar workers and large institutions, both in the U.S. Any electrical grids that operate on a smart grid would fail, causing power outages on top of the internet outages.įor most people who work in high-powered or white-collar jobs (such as academics, doctors, lawyers, journalists and more), an internet shutdown for the day would be the equivalent of a “snow day” from work or school.
Some television programming that is sent via broadcast towers would still be accessible via an antenna, but most digital channels would be lost. What would happen if there was an internet shutdown?įor the everyday person, some cell phone services and text messaging would be unavailable, all mobile apps and social networking sites would be down, cloud storage would be inaccessible, any pending electronic payments would fail, and more. “The problems are becoming a focus because so many were caught unaware, but they are minor compared to the benefits.” “But in the case of the internet, it has been overwhelmingly a good thing – enhancing the information resources of individuals and institutions worldwide,” Dutton said. Since the creation of the internet, it’s grown rapidly and every day there’s a new use case being created - some good and some bad. “Many were focused on sharing information among academics, and did not imagine everyday banking and shopping moving online as it has.” Dutton, a Senior Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and author of Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, told Allconnect®.
“Many of those who founded or invented the early conceptions of the internet did not anticipate how reliant society would become on digital networks,” William H. Nearly everyone in the United States uses the internet, and our reliance on it grows every day. While internet usage may not be as high worldwide, in the U.S alone, about a quarter of adults say they’re online “almost constantly,” according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. It wasn’t until 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and launched his first web client and server in 1990 that the internet as we know it started to take form.īack in 1995, less than 1% (0.77% to be exact) of the world was using the internet. The “internet” in its most basic form as a “network of networks” officially launched on January 1, 1983, but dates back to the mid-1950s. It wasn’t that long ago that we actually did live in a world without the internet.
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