Browsing: Internet

How does a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a garden hose carry roughly 99 per cent of intercontinental internet traffic across 13,000 kilometres of ocean floor?

Saving Tips August 9, 2026

The answer is that the cable is barely doing the work. The glass inside it is. Every intercontinental fibre carries…

How did one incorrect command input during a routine debugging task in February 2017 knock a large slice of the internet offline for about four hours?

Saving Tips August 4, 2026

It was Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as S3, in the Northern Virginia region called US-EAST-1. At 9:37 a.m.…

Content and cloud networks now account for three-quarters of used international bandwidth, while Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon own, co-own or buy capacity on a growing share of the 600-plus submarine cable systems carrying over 99 per cent of data between countries, a private map hidden below the wireless internet

Saving Tips July 28, 2026

More than 99 per cent of international data traffic descends from coastal landing stations into hair-thin glass fibres and crosses…

How did a single computer worm written by a Cornell graduate student in November 1988 crash roughly 6,000 machines and force the internet to invent security?

Saving Tips July 27, 2026

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a Cornell graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris uploaded a small C program…

How did a single mistyped command by one AWS engineer in February 2017 knock a huge slice of the internet offline for nearly four hours?

Saving Tips July 23, 2026

The outage began just after 9:37 a.m. Pacific time, in a data centre region called US-EAST-1, in Northern Virginia. Within…

A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Jiroemon Kimura was born on April 19, 1897, in a small village near Kyotango on the Sea of Japan coast,…

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

The great majority of data that crosses between continents travels through fibre-optic cables on the seabed, not through satellites. Estimates…

How to Fix the Wi-Fi Connected No Internet Issue in Windows

Saving Tips March 4, 2026

It is very confusing when you are connected to Wi-Fi yet have no actual internet access. While it might seem…

How to Display Your Internet Speed on the Taskbar in Windows

Saving Tips March 2, 2026

When the Internet is crawling slowly, it is a good idea to be able to view your live internet speed…