The First Major Network Crash: The Four-Hour Collapse of the ARPANET
On October 27, 1980, the digital world experienced its first major wake-up call: a four-hour collapse of the ARPANET , the pioneering network that laid the groundwork for today’s Internet. What began as a bold experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to connect research institutions across the country suddenly revealed the fragility of even the most advanced systems. Originally linking just four sites in California and Utah, ARPANET had grown into a sprawling web of communication between universities, labs, and government agencies. It was revolutionary—allowing remote access, file sharing, and email long before these became household concepts. But on that fateful day, the network went dark. The cause? A perfect storm of technical missteps. A single-error detecting code, designed to catch transmission faults, was used for sending data but not for storing it. Compounding the issue was a flawed garbage-collection algorithm meant to clean up...
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