On Wednesday, July 18, 2001, a freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel. Flammable liquid ignited, causing a fire that raised the temperature in the tunnel to 1,000 to 1,500 degrees. “We’re told some of the boxcars are actually glowing,” a fire-department spokesperson told the Associated Press. More than 100 firefighters were called to fight the blaze.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the fire but never figured out what went wrong. No one was killed, and other trains were rerouted to avoid the inferno. But more than trains navigated the tunnel’s brick-lined walls: Several internet-service providers and telecommunications companies were running cables through it. The internet couldn’t be so easily retransmitted. The cables that wound their way through the tunnel were damaged, and web traffic as far away as Atlanta and Los Angeles slowed to a crawl. One company that measures web performance said“the internet delays were the worst it had seen,” reported the Associated Press. A single tunnel was responsible for much of the country’s web traffic, and Americans paid the price.
The internet isn’t what we think. It is physical, subject to the vagaries of nature and time, just as our bodies are. Like us, it will flicker and fade. The internet’s fragility crops up everywhere: in the sudden disappearance of a relied-upon website, and in the endless thrum of posts, images, and videos.
In the case of the Howard Street Tunnel, the fragility became, without warning, quite obvious. As the writer Maria Farrell and the technologist Robin Berjon note in their 2024 essay titled “We Need to Rewild the Internet,” WorldCom—a major phone-and-internet company at the time—played an important role in the outages that followed the inferno. “WorldCom had spread web traffic over different fiber networks,” they write, but “the region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity.” Despite dealing in the physical world—in the fiber-optic cables that make up the real, material internet—WorldCom had somehow forgotten that the land makes its own rules.
Bottlenecks can have their benefits. Efficiencies can be found in transmitting data through companies that consolidate the services we need to be online. In 2021, Fastly, a cloud-utility provider, stopped working for an hour, taking down the websites of major news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and The Guardian. The Verge, a technology-news site, ended up publishing updates about the outage via Google Docs while its website was down. The day of the disruption, Fastly’s stock price actually rose. “Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service,” Farrell and Berjon write. “To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.” Fragility and profit go hand in hand, which makes some sense when you remember that corporate redundancy always carries inefficiency. Brittleness is big business, a feature and not a bug of the cloud economy.
But the cloud obscures the very real collection of companies, people, and processes that create and structure the internet. When we put something in the cloud, we don’t just offload the responsibility of maintaining our data to fickle chunks of magnetic metal alight with electricity; we also offload that responsibility to a rather limited set of fickle human institutions. You might want your family photos to live in the cloud for centuries, but “most companies do not last long,” Maxwell Neely-Cohen wrote for the Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab. “They get acquired or split up into pieces or go bankrupt or decline into something much smaller or are upended by catastrophic geopolitical events.”
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The cloud also shrouds the cables, data centers, and transmission towers that compose the internet itself. “The cloud is made possible by a relatively small number of undersea cables that require constant maintenance,” continued Neely-Cohen. For a medium so often praised as decentralized, for a metaphor that calls to mind something diffuse, that’s an awful lot of centralization. A small number of companies own the data centers, connected by a small number of cables also owned by a small number of companies, through which data, yet again owned by a small number of companies, flow. The internet, in this telling, looks much more like the Howard Street Tunnel than a cloud.
And now artificial intelligence has gusted in, revealing the physical infrastructure that the cloud used to hide. Ordinary people can see more clearly than ever the precarity of the supply chains and the power of the chips that fill the water-guzzling, electricity-hungry data centers that so many have come to loathe.
Just as AI reveals the physicality of our digital lives, it has also brought into sharp focus the crucial pieces of software that undergird the internet. Last week, an AI model found security vulnerabilities in PHP, a coding language used in 70 percent of websites. Despite its centrality to the modern web, I’d hazard a guess that PHP isn’t a household name. Originally named as an acronym for personal homepage, it was built to help host its creator’s résumé. As PHP grew in popularity, it shed some of that DIY spirit—and that acronym—but, like so many essential systems that keep the web online, volunteers remain an essential part of its maintenance.
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In a classic comic about the state of modern infrastructure, a precarious Jenga tower is held up by a single block labeled “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” AI—swarming onto rarely used Wikipedia pages, probing poorly run government websites, discovering zero-day exploits—has shown the web to be the frail, uncanny place that it has always been. Indeed, the most cloudlike part of this state of affairs is the absence of human agency.
As users of the web, we have to pay attention to the data and infrastructure that the cloud cloaks. Hordes of flesh-and-blood engineers, sitting in glass-and-steel office buildings and water-and-air-cooled data centers, attend to the systems that hold our words, pictures, and videos. What we store and what we transmit are acts of attention to a world that remains resolutely material, despite the seeming immateriality of our digital lives. Human institutions remain central to the practice of storage and transmission—an inconvenient fact, because human institutions fade, just as human bodies do. The cloud is refreshed every moment of every day by the fresh attention of humans. Just as manure, in balance, can encourage the dogwood to flower, so, too, does our care—over generations—make the internet bloom.
This article was adapted from John West’s new book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You.