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  • If a) every server in world was connected to a single power source; b) there were no back ups or off grid servers (or any other loop holes); and c) I turned the power off and on again, could I theoretically erase all the information on the internet?

    As I suspect the answer is no, if I left it powered off for a year then turned it back on, would there be any issues (purely related to the information stored on the internet, not societal collapse)?

  • No, most of them would be fine.
    Pull the plug on your desktop pc and turn it on a year later - there would be a few failures but by and large Wikipedia, Amazon and azure would be still there.

  • could I theoretically erase all the information on the internet?

    No, because the majority of it is on non-volatile storage (magnetic discs and EEPROM aka Flash)

    Some things might temporarily look slightly different when you reboot because parameters for dynamically generated content which were stored in RAM would be lost, and they would only regenerate the same way if the user interactions which set the parameters were replicated.

  • if I left it powered of for a year

    It would take a lot longer than that to accumulate enough bit errors to overcome error correction. If you left it for 100 years you could probably detect some losses if you went looking for them.

  • One possible issue is if servers depend on checking in with other servers to start up correctly. There's going to be some interesting circular dependencies that no one's thought about or hopes will never happen.

    Plus if you kept the whole internet off for a year, every server would have expired SSL certificates and might not be able to download new ones without manual intervention.

    (there's an analogous problem with the power grid called a black start )

  • Some databases are stored in RAM (more so before SSDs), so theoretically if they didn't dump them out before your act of vandalism there could be lost data as they revery to the last backup.

  • A lot of servers will have UPSs (batteries) that will keep them going while they cleanly shut down. Also, errors on a single disc ('bitrot') can be detected by some filesystems.

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