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Blackout Worse For Internet Than Previously Thought?
An anonymous reader writes "Renesys (the people who previously brought you cool animated graphs of the US/Canada power outage has a new report out. It challenges the widely
held belief that the Internet was largely unaffected by the power outage. Lots of important networks lost connectivity, including banks, hospitals, government organizations and investment funds. There's a cool appendix on the huge Italian power outage in September as well. They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure."
It has always seemed to me that the internet isn't all that de-centralized, but a few major companies ran most of the backbones. Since it isn't a huge ad-hoc network, most of the data for an area probably goes out through no more than 5 connections. Especially in rual areas, I wouldn't doubt that at least one routing station in each of those chains doesn't have good long term backup facilities.
or generators. It takes large battery capacity to sustain long uptimes when htere is a facilities power outage.
Its a no brainer. Do the routers run on solar, wind, tidal power?
In Russia, Power needs Internet.
WhatMeWorry?
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Ready or not, the internet is increasingly being used for critical infrastructure. At best, failures like the power outage should motivate governments and industry to bolster the internet up to where it needs to be for reliability standards.
But seemingly no less so than the power grid.
-Peter
Exactly how does one system's dependance on a critical infrastructure (the power grid) and it's failure when that infrastructure fails imply that it's not ready?
Bah, I could have told you that. I work for an ISP that serves 15 states. I get calls from people who put 100% of their business into a DSL line - with no backup to other carriers or mediums. When a hardware failure or trunk line failure occures - they go postal.
Sorry, but uptime is not 100% never was, never will be - plan for it, or deal with it when your connection goes down.
Even though we have multiple connections to the backbone - local trunks can go down. Aka backhoe attacks on burried fiber, or dove hunters blasting pole run fiber (don't laugh - it happened last week). If you don't have a backup DSL,ISDN, or heck even dialup connection for your business - then stfu and wait while we repair.
And don't even get me started on residential accounts that call in 'I use this for work I need it up now - send someone out today.' And it's Sunday evening... no - you didn't pay for a business account, so you get residential service levels which include 24-72 hour turn around on repairs.
we all thought? I never thought it was possible.
For Karma-Whoring purposes, I wish to not name the
site. Besides, if you don't know the page, you have
nothing to complain about.
If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?
I'm not saying there isn't other evidence that would support such a conclusion, but the real failure here was the power infrastructure, upon which the net relied "critically" in the first place...
I lost slashdot for a day. I almost had to commit a suicide to relieve the pain.
The reason everybody said that the internet survived was that they were able to visit most of the sites they cared about during the blackout. The chart seems to show that many links and servers were down (presumably without power) during the blackout (including some major components of the internet), yet most people basically unaffected. This seems to suggest that as long as the server itself isn't in the middle of a blackout, the Internet can survive rather well. How many of your learned about the blackout from Slashdot or some other online news source?
I read the internet for the articles.
but then again i'm in finland. and oh yeah, was on holidays. at our summer house. drinking alcohol too.
it got to the news quite fast though, thanks for keeping us entertained! we had all these wild theories on what the extra news report would be on and why it had happened!
seriously though, who cares if the internet works if the computers aren't on? i think that might have been the biggest problem.,.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Air Canada lost it's reservations/bookings/everything servers, and couldn't operate anything approaching normally for one reason. The servers were based in the midst of the blackout.
Out here on the left coast, there were no effects. So why, don't international org.s and government departments have duplicate facilities on independant grids? That's always bugged me.
bwh
$$$$$ That's why.
If J random web server loses power and drops off-line, that's not a network outage. All but the most mom-and-pop of ISPs have redundant power anyway.
I live in denmark and recently we had a blackout that lasted maybe 10 hours.
While I was unable to make any phone calls, I could get on the internet with GPRS and surf to our server with my laptop for as long as the laptop batteries lasted.
The server is hosted in a colo datacenter which was also in the middle of the affected area. We run a mud on the server, and most of the players are from USA. They never discovered the blackout as the datacenter went on emergency diesel backup and apparently knew to make business with backbone providers that also knew their stuff.
So to the people saying that internet can only route around blackout areas but not _through_ them, this is not true. Seems at least here in denmark all the infrastructure on the backbones got backup power and just keeps working when everyone else is busy lighting candles.
The people affected by the downed routers were people who were in the blackout and couldn't turn on their computers anyway, so it doesn't matter that those machines were down. People outside the blackout were able to route around it, and THAT is the relevant part of the statement that the internet did well during the blackout.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Well, look at it this way... they say "an UPS is good enough, if power goes out it will go out a few seconds or maybe a half hour", and don't plan for a "worse-case" scenario, in which you have a few hours of "power outage"... so instead of saving everything, commiting caches and so on, they just keep on hoping "in a few seconds power will be back on"... I just hope they DID learn their lesson now, and cut back on cutbacks (lol).
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
I don't understand why critical systems were not backed up with UPSs and generators? Power failures happen everywhere. You should never be 100% reliant on utility power. A generator with adequate supply of diesel (and contract to keep it full for long term outages) is a must have for critical systems in my opinion.
I work in a hospital in Toronto. There were almost NO facilities or services that functioned in the early parts of the blackout. Would you claim phones are a critical infrastructure? It's true that they worked during the power outage, but very quickly all the phone networks were too congested to provide service - this lasted for several hours. Radio stations continued to broadcast until their backups ran out and we were left with dead air. Thankfully, the hospitals had sufficient emergency generation to support several days without external power, but I wonder how could such a heavy power consumer as the internet rely on backup? It is really a question of "how many other essential services require internet connectivity during a blackout", because every citizen surely doesn't need it right now.
this stuff is unbreakable, & works on several (more than 3) dimensions.
First off, it's spelled 'n-u-c-l-e-a-r'. Second, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'unbreakable'. If you're refering to the enriched Uranium-238 rods they use to generate the power, than you're wrong. Nuclear fission, anyone?
it's not hurting the 'net.
Very incorrect. What do you think the Internet is powered by? Hampsters on wheels????
> sometimes the power goes out. you didn't know that?
Yes, there have been electricity shortages in the past, but the sort of indiffernce people like you display is what what stops us from preventing power outages in the future.
"Don't be part of the problem; be a part of the solution." -Bill Gates
Internet outages when they start putting high speed internet on power lines...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
In fact, at the rate that they were (are?) losing money, having their operations shut down temporarily probably saved them a fortune. Sadly it looks like they have not been allowed to go bankrupt.
I have a pedal-powered generator. I'm my own grid.
Oh christ. Even my Windoze servers automatically stop write caching during a power outage, and shut themselves down when my UPS batteries run out (45-60 minutes on my last field test)
You can't tell me that "big corporations" don't have the basics covered insofar as the servers shutting themselves down when the UPSes are ready to drop off?
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
And Roger Daltrey is a dirty paedophile!!!
Given that while major segments of network were taken out by the blackout, other large parts of the Internet including parts of the Internet inside the area with power failure remained unaffected -- as established by this report, one would likely conclude that the Internet is at least as reliable as the power grid if not quite a bit more so.
Given that the power grid is already considered critical infrastructure, it doesn't make sense why they would make the conclusion that the Internet is not suitable as such, although it's been established as more reliable (though not completely fault tolerant)
Their original conclusion was drawn based on logic working backwards from the failure.
Then my landline died like 3 hours later. Completely. No voltage what so ever. but my mobile worked for the whole duration of the outage. Couldn't make any local calls for the first 30 minutes or so, but, oh well.
They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure."
Oh yeah? Boys Scouts like me have their 256 CDs of pr0n and mp3 ready in their trusty CaseLogic. We'll last a week longer than everyone else in the event of a catastrophic blackout.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Frankly people the internet is run along the same backbone as the telephone system. Why? Cost. It is as reliable as your major long-distance phone carriers, because it's switched right along side of the long distance phone network.
What bugs me far more than the internet going down is the fact that some morons think that generating power in Oregon and sending it across the country to Virginia to save $0.03 a kilowatt hour is somehow a bright idea.
It's like the dotcom people have taken their business plans and become utility consultants and lobbiests.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The data they present indicates that the blackout had a severe regional impact. I see nothing that shows that there was a significant global impact (meaning that I can't get data from AS 12374 to AS 553, for example).
The WTC collapse probably had more impact on global routing (some large carriers had primary and backup equipment in both basements).
Without you telling us, I could tell that you were from an ISP, by your telling "deal with it" response. Truly, if your lines went down with the major backbone, your Boss would be saying "I use this for work, and I need it up now!" to UUNET, MCI, or whoever you connect through. Many businesses use the internet for mission critical processes (i'd say an ISP fits this bill), and it is important that recovery is quick and efficient.
What ISP do you work for? Obviously with your attitude, all businesses should go somewhere else for good customer service.
Time to go back to Sneaker-net
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
The vast majority of the networks that went dark were 24-bit in size. That is generally either small to medium businesses or home office, or a division of a larger business. I think we can all agree that outages at that level, though undesired, are not the end of the world. Small outfits and home office workers can afford the down time in the case of a general crisis (ie the buses aren't running, either, so go have a coffee and read the WSJ) and 4-8 hour outages on their DSL are not uncommon either. I know that is the case where I work, and we have a global presence too.
We invested in a very large portable battery backup system for our server room back when California was having its own blackouts. The stack would probably stay up an hour or so, which we figure is enough to manage most blackouts nicely, and anything longer than that is a "major cockup" that we need to wait out. But if we go down who will care? Just us, and not all that much.
I think that the general expectation regarding the internet is not that it will stay up 100% in a crisis, but that it will continue to operate in cells of functionality during most kinds of disaster, then recover quickly on its own as soon as it can built remote connections again. Compare that to the electric grid, where most or all cells of function were sucked empty and driven into the ground when the grid dried up, and engineers spent days coordinating their recovery so that the first cell to go online didn't feed the entire electric grid on its own. Tricky stuff.
TCP/IP is built to understand rolling outages and uncoordinated recovery. The electric grid still is not. That, I would submit, is the main issue and not that routers on the edge of small networks didn't have generator backup.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?
Because the internet is communication, not power. So the correct comparison is the telephone company, not the power company.
Power can be backed up locally. Communication can not. So power only needs to be available MOST of the time, with backups on any critical services, to achieve its "critical infrastructure" level of reliability. Communications, on the other hand, requires an infrastructure with multiple links, routing around failures, and local power backup at the active nodes to achieve its own "critical infrastructure" service levels.
The telephone company HAS this level of backup power built in. Switching centers, for instance, run their equipment directly from TWO banks of 48v batteries suitable for days of operation, and run battery chargers continuously when there's power available. Repeaters on long copper trunks are powered from the endpoints - and can run with only one endpoint hot. Telephone instruments are powered from the central office switch via the copper wire. Active customer premesis equipment has battery backup for critical features or is designed to connect at least one POTS phone directly to a copper pair to the switch in case of blackout, and so on. SONET nodes are wired as rings rather than trees, so you have to cut TWO fibers in different places to isolate them. Other trunks are redundant and switch over automatically in case of outage. I could go on. About the only place a single cable cut can cut you off is the line to your house - and if you pay (a lot!) extra (as some businesses do) you can get another run in by a different path, so no single backhoe or downed pole can isolate you.
The Internet was ORIGINALLY designed with this kind of redundancy built in. Individual links were via the tellco's infrastructure, with its power-failure resistance. Routing was automatic, and would find a route between any two nodes if one still existed. (It WAS designed by people who were at least THINKING about surviving a nuclear attack, after all.)
But with the "inflation" of the commercial internet this robustness was lost. The explosion of active IP addresses made routing tables impossibly large, while most sites were connected via a local ISP rather than ad-hoc connection to two (or more) internet neighbors.
So the internet split into a "backbone" with SOME of the old routing redundancy, interconnecting ISPs, who in turn give you a default route JUST to their own servers. If your ISP fails you're cut off, and if the backbone connections to your ISP fail, ditto (even if you in principle COULD reach the rest of the net through somebody with a two-ISP feed.)
The ISP buisness has FIERCE price competition, and one BIG way to cut costs is to reduce redundant routing internally and neglect backup power.
At the backbone level the long-haul networks carrying the data had an even FIERCER price war, due to the excessive long-haul buildout of the internet bubble. Perhaps some of the upstarts powered their switches and repeaters with local power (on the assumption that the could slough any site that had a local power failure and that they'd have a path with all equipment powered between any two customers still live). A major blackout would violate that assumption, cutting off not just the dead area but others who could only reach the rest of the net by routing through it.
How about your DSL or cable IP feed? Did your cable company include battery backup power in the repeaters, pole-mounted routers, and fiber/cable bridges? Is you settop box battery backed up? How about your DSL modem? If you're corporate, are all your routers, your VoIP bridge, and any desktops running a softphone on the UPS? Do your SIP phones run if the power fails? (Home users ditto for your PC.)
Until all these are fixed the internet is NOT running at "critical infrastructure" reliability levels. So you'll want to think VERY CAREFULLY before disconnecting your POTS line and depending on Internet-VoIP. B-)
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So when's someone gonna fess up and admit that the Power Grid is not ready for critical infrastructure either?
`which fortune`
From having been around the Internet for the last 15 years now..
The Internet was a lot MORE capable of being infrastructure, before *.com happened. Since it has been commercialized, the backbones have become more and more important, and routing/re-routing less and less important.
"Error: No Route To Host" at one point in history, literally meant that the computer directly connecting the computer you were trying to reach was offline. Now, "No Route To Host" means that there was a power failure somewhere in the world that just happened to be in the way of your provider routing through a few other providers, or that a janitor somewhere kicked out a plug in Minnesota, while you were trying to connect from Michigan to Texas.
The system used to be able to route around virtually ANY connectivity issue. Now, it can't route it's way out of a wet paper bag.
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In other news, Generalissimo Franco is still dead.
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ack! unclosed parenthesis... must stay calm... do not panic!
I read about the outage first on *slashdot*. You can't tell me the "Internet" was knocked out. It's "parts of the Internet that did not have power" that were knocked out. I mean come on, do they expect the public sewage system to work when there's no water?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Well, maybe that's not obvious to some people. But to any sysadmin who's had to deal with choked networks in the wake of the latest Outlook exploit, it should bloody well be.
Hell, the recent blackout pretty much means that the electrical grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure, either.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Radio stations continued to broadcast until their backups ran out and we were left with dead air
Just some thoughts about 1998's power outage during winter. Apparently, the air conditioning was not working in the most recent major power failure, which caused people to sweat more than what they were accustomed to.
Radio in Montreal, until the ice storm, has been fairly stable
"This situation continued until 1200 when CJFM management decided that they had to "protect their audience" and returned to their regular music programming. As a concession to the storm and the fate of their AM counterpart CJFM did carry the expanded CJAD news broadcasts but apart from that a listener to CJFM would not have known that Montreal was enduring the worst storm in living memory."
but this surprises, WHO, exactly? i work for a large telco (I won't mention AT&T by name) and i can assure you that even if YOU were up, THEY were down. which effectively made YOU down as well. those few days SUCKED to work for a carrier, lemm tell you...
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Newsflash: the internet is already critical infrastructure, and the power grid that failed is critical infrastructure and has been for the better part of a Century.
If you're saying that lack of failure defines whether something is critical or ready to be critical then I guess by that definition the electrical distribution grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure. That is preposterous because it is and manages quite nicely for the most part. The rest is down to cost benefit.
I live and work in the NYC metro area, and was at work when the blackout started. I didn't notice there was a blackout until I walked outside and saw our generators on. For the record, I work for a company that provides services to large internet datacenters. Any datacenter worth its monthly fee wasn't affected by the power outage. Yes, individual institutions including banks etc etc who weren't prepared did lose connectivity, but backbone providers and large carrier centers in the area didn't skip a beat.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Hell, the recent blackout pretty much means that the electrical grid isn't ready to be critical infrastructure, either.
Let's not forget that part of the justification for building the Interstate highway system was that the high-speed roads could be closed down and used for military transport and possibly even as air strips in case the USA is even invaded. So, any civilian "in case of war" plan that depends on the highways being available is flawed because those roads just might not be open.
Truth is... there's no such thing as something that will always be there, all things can fail.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
In australia Testra the main telephone company can keep its exchances up for 12 hours without power from mains for sure and if the power drops out at the right time 24 hours without starting the generators. We had a union that caused rolling blackouts so our systems had to get hardened. Most of our ISP are built around the same kind of stuff around 4 to 5 hours without starting generators.
Basicly it was not fun not knowing when the power was going to be on or off.
The dropout should have had min effect on services if your telephone systems and ISP where up to standarded. Due to the fact that 4-5 hours of run time at the ISP so the system should have been able to shutdown correctly and be restarted quickly when a generator was aquired.(Best for the generator to be recharging the UPS so that you can refuel the generator).
Basicly It just showed how unprepared the USA was for a system attack. It is harder here taking out one point ie the Power grid has very minor effect.
Take out a austrilia telephone exchange system have the mobile phone network running fine(Solar powered and radio linked the mobile network is here)
When the australia BBQ comes in handy go to a friend with a BBQ have tea sleep over and wait for the power to come back. Yep the phones work to so setting it up is not a problem. Now it is a real feast due to food that is going to be bad. Better smoked or eaten than rotten. Yep where was the USA sprit piles of food going to be stuffed time for one huge all you can eat party.
Some thing to rival the bostan tea party so if it was a attack so that is was remember as the best time ever.
Even Australia still need work but the USA is a mess all the food that could have been eaten that got dumped.
I was interning for a large company.
A few weeks prior, they moved the datacenter, to a brand new facility. The new feature was a generator attached to the datacenter, rather than a few hours of batteries. From what I was told, prior it was only batteries.
Found out after, that there was power the whole time in the datacenter, and services were pretty regular.
So not everyone did bad. Depends on how prepaired they were (and of course some luck).
It's amusing to me that TV was the example used to explain the dependencies between critical infrastructure.
:-)
Since when has TV become important to the survival of the population?
This does NOT mean, as people seem to think (like the guy making the headline post) that this guarentees 100% uptime.
If things could be 100% relied upon, there would be no need for rerouting or redundancy. Since TCP/IP was made for the real world, where connections go down occasionally (power outage, hardware failure, nuclear missle, whatever), the ability to change was planned for.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Except when the electrical grid breaks down hospitals, banks, and everyone else that runs something important has generators to make up for it. They don't have a generator that will let them access the database on the Internet a few thousand miles away though.
What?
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This article obviously overstates the problem significantly. Those who had power could get on the web, those who did not could not. Those who had power could communicate with others who had power over the web for the most part even when those inbetween did not. The failure is with the power grid, not with the internet, the internet is reliant on that system, and of course when that system goes down in an area the internet will as well. However the internet as a whole performed quite gracefully, barely noticing the loss.
;)
Furthermore, none of the types of organizations listed above are exactly important or significant in their presence on the web. Nobody really misses them. If slashdot went down it might be different, but as we all know, slashdot has a much more redudant and stable setup, being that's it a more critical function.
Another interesting thing I've noted on a quasi side note. It's incredible how many people here seem to think that a UPS is a solution for keeping things up during a power outage!!! A UPS is not a device that is very useful for keeping systems up in a power outage at all!!
A UPS is a device you choose to be slightly larger than what you need to survive the transition to the backup generator which is what keeps your systems up during an outage. It also needs to have a bit more juice left over to smooth the power flow coming in since the generator will undoubtedly be giving out "dirty" power.
If you can't afford a generator, you can't afford to stay up during an outage. If you live in an area of reasonably good power supply there is really no point to a UPS at all without a generator. If you live in an area in which the power is dirty and flaky like that from a generator THEN maybe your on to something with a UPS and no generator
To me, life and death is critical. Not being able to read Slashdot is not critical. Are there functions at, say, hospitals where people's lives hang on being able to access the Internet? Backup power just takes a generator. How do you provide backup Internet to a hospital? I think that's the distinction between the electrical grid and the Internet. You can't really provision your own Internet for emergency purposes. At least not very easily.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
It may even be the most uncritical component of this world.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
for an outage of this size, people would most likely need a generator or something larger than a battery backup... don't forget, they need to keep their homes running as well...
I don't like big government either, but an FTC law (or whatever) mandating backup power for ISPs/backbones of sufficient size or type of service (business vs residenial) might be what's needed.
what the government needs to do is put more money into researching fuel cells. that way every house can power itself and feed electricity back into the grid, dampening the effects of an outage like this one.
I work at a major hospital in New York City. We lost all power for about five minutes, while the facilities crew were making sure that the clinical areas didn't lose it for even a second. (We were covered in the meantime by garden variety UPS's.) After we got emergency power back, it was no different than any other day. Our Internet service was up and running fine. I was reading Slashdot again in minutes. :)
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TV runs on electricity.......?
it seems inappropriate to deem an extremely useful system "not ready for critical use" simply because it can not deal with a temporary catostrophic power loss which occurs for a dozen hours every few decades.
spending big money to counter a rare contingency such as this seems wasteful as well.
if anything, we should welcome the holiday from the rat race.
The internet impresses me every day. Its the ridiculous expectations of people that blow my mind.
When the world trade center went down, I worked at a major ISP. Verizon is right next door to the WTC, not surprisingly all the main trunks were destroyed. Connectivity for much of the Atlantic including Europe was disrupted. Many carriers had cell towers on top of the building as well. Even from California I didn't need to be told the internet was going to be f#@*ed up on the east. Yet some how people in NYC who had to travel to NJ to find a working phone would call me and ask why their DSL was down.
The fact that the whole north east had no power, and the majority of the internet worked shows the internet has done a very good job of doing just what its designed for. It could do a better job. So lets work on that instead of just talking about it.
They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
Huh? It would seem to me that the fucking power grid is not yet ready to be critical infrastructure but hey, here we are. Shit. There is nothing in the world (except for the sun, oceans, etc.) that is 100.00000% dependable.
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> They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
So. They conclude that the internet is supposed to be more reliable than the power grid...or else it's not ready for prime-time?
Sounds like they're setting their standards a bit too high.
Really? It already is a mission critical infrastructure for my company and most others, I suspect. When some idiot with a backhoe takes the region down for a few hours, we're in serious doo-doo (no second carrier where I am). We switch to ye ole spreadsheet as a backup, but we're crippled without Internet access.
I agree with the article - there are some serious architectural flaws that need to be addressed; however, fact of the matter is that the internet has already become a mission critical technology despite these shortcomings.
Maybe they should invest in one then. They're this neat ancient technology called a M O D E M. I'm sure they could also invest in a sat link if it's that crucial to have the bandwidth durring a long term blackout.
I work for a fortune 500 company based in Cleveland Ohio, when the power went out, plants in Ky, Tn, Mi, Ar, Ms and in field offices all across the nation had problems because the main computer was down. They had generators but since nobody knew how long the outage would last they only ran critical functions to conserve. Several of the plants shut down departments because they rely on internet access too much. If it would have lasted longer, it would even have affected payroll-then I would have been very upset.
Think of the number of manufacturer plants whose headquarters are based in the area of the outage and rely on the internet for communications. think of what this could have done to the economy.
left coast
I'm looking from the North down you insensitive clod.
I had to do actual work. What a load of crock!
At the moment i can't reach all sites. Also i can't chat and my msn messager doesn't work.
I live in the north of the Netherlands. On the teletext i read there are problems with internet and telephone in places in the middle and south of the Netherlands.
Well, facts seem to contradict common sense here ;)
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
This question is; "critical for what purpose?" then.
Yes you can provide redundance, of course electricity is a prerequisite. There are satellite links and microwave and/or radio communications that you could use if you thought it important enough. Once again the cart is before the horse here, life and death is not the definition of critical infrastructure, neither is redundance. Critical in a context like this typically means it is critical for performing business functions (for example), and it certainly meets that definition.
You seem to overlook that it was a lack of electricity and a lack of backup that brought the internet down. Backups tend to provide reduced capability for an hour or so, and not everyone has them. Nobody would argue that electricity isn't critical infrastructure, but going to local backup generation means that *infrastructure* has *failed*. Similarly roads are critical infrastructure, but they failed in the blackout too (thanks to signalling issues).