Oh, the irony!

While millions of other people were knocked offline for hours when the global internet infrastructure company, Cloudflare, experienced an outage on Tuesday, November 18; my online life at work was humming along just fine, as the critical systems I rely upon to keep our Newsroom and Morning Show running, just kept on ticking.

But when I got home and started working on this show; something very weird happened. First, there was an area-wide Spectrum internet outage, which happened after the Cloudflare issue was resolved. Once it was over; I tried to get online to file a story for this website, and for some reason, just could not connect.

Eight hours later, after countless calls to Apple Tech Support, and a complete reformat of my hard drive; I was back up and running–and almost completely out of my mind with anxiety about not getting my work done on time, frustration over having to make so many phone calls, and suffering from a massive headache.

What happened to me, though, was related to a glitch in the Apple OS, which presented itself in a way that was so twisty and unique; even the Apple techs were kind of stumped for awhile. Eventually, we got it all figured out, and all is right in my digital world. It just took a couple of days to get it back together.

But, the fact that all this happened the very same day as the Cloudflare incident, was a pretty much picture-perfect snapshot, of what everybody, everywhere, would experience if the global infrastructure that supports internet connections somehow got compromised long-term. You can bet it would take more than a couple of days, and a few phone calls to tech support to sort it out.

For example, what if something super bad happened, and it wasn’t just an accident; like the undersea cables that connect much of the world’s internet getting cut, or a massive cyberattack  took out multiple cloud providers at once? Then, you would have people all over the world unable to work, to communicate, to shop, to get paid, and more–for who knows how long.

So, somebody needs to figure out how to make sure it doesn’t happen. We know governments are working on it, and that they take the issue seriously. Last week on this show, in fact, we had a report from CBS News about NATO war games involving the US and its allies role-playing how to block and counter undersea Russian military attacks.

But while governments have a role to play in protecting the internet; they don’t control all, or even most of it.

So, according to my special guest today, Cybersecurity expert, Dr. John Nicholas; we need to rely on big business, which has serious vulnerabilities when it comes to keeping critical internet infrastructure up and running, and which may or may not be up to the challenge in the event of some kind of major attack.

Find out more, listen now:

Dr. John Nicholas, Associate Dean of Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering Technology at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C)