Wenn man es genauer betrachtet, hängt die Tatsache, dass ich heute morgen eine Überweisung aufgegeben, ein Dutzend Emails verschickt und einen Videoanruf gemacht habe, davon ab, dass einige Dutzend Mechaniker auf Schiffen nicht schlafen.

Diese faszinierende Reportage aus The Verge konzentriert sich auf die Reparateure des Internets. Unbemerkt von uns Internet-Nutzern hängt unsere Wifi-Versorgung auch von den transozeanischen Kabeln ab, die teilweise tief unter Wasser auf dem Meeresboden verlaufen.

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

Fast jeden Tag, genauer gesagt an gut 200 Tagen im Jahr, wird ein Kabel gestört oder angeknackst, und dann liegt unsere Möglichkeit, mit dem Rest der Welt digital zu kommunizieren, in den Händen einer vergleichsweise schmal ausgestatteten Mannschaft:

The world is in the midst of a cable boom, with multiple new transoceanic lines announced every year. But there is growing concern that the industry responsible for maintaining these cables is running perilously lean. There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet.

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”