No Wikipedia? What if the Internet went down?

Tech » World is so intertwined that no Internet could be disastrous, experts say.

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"Those three days I felt deprived," she recalled in an email, responding to a Twitter request for anecdotes about going Internet-less. "The Internet has consumed my life, both business as well as pleasure."

Wyatt McMahon of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech University was having a hard time just dealing with the shutdown at Wikipedia, which he leans on as a first step in his searches in his field, which combines statistics and biology.

If the entire Internet were lost, "that would be beyond catastrophic. Every single day, every single hour, if not every 30 minutes, I am using the Internet for work," McMahon said. "So if anything like that were to happen, it would bring everything to a screeching halt."

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