I’ve just been talking to a scientist friend about the world wide outages following the problems at Microsoft:
He told me that ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ - just wait until we have a massive solar flare. Apparently the last one we had was in 1859 which burnt out telephone wires. It was name after the man who discovered it:
Trouble is that the world doesn’t have a plan B.
To pick a nit, that would be telegraph…
DB2
EMP. Electro Magnetic Pulse. Solar flares can cause this, but I remember many times over the decades to be Leary of a nuclear explosion high enough above ground to not cause damage to structures or even people, but to knock out electrical devices.
As I understand this orbiting satellites have to sometimes re-orient themselves in space due to space weather. (They are much higher in our protective magnetosphere, meaning they are not as protected as we are on the surface). So sometimes they will turn their more protected side towards the sun.
Technically, they could have been considered telephone wires years later since old telegraph wires were repurposed for telephones.
Mike
Here are 2 sites I check regularly.
At the second one you can sign up for alerts whenever significant solar activity occurs.
https://pss.swpc.noaa.gov/ProductSubscriptionService/LoginWebForm.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2FProductSubscriptionService%2F