system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Where actually is the Internet? Can the whole Internet crash? Why aren’t there Internet slow downs like there are traffic jams?
gpt
The internet is everywhere. It is a combination of various smaller corporate and private networks, hence the term internet Interconnected-network

The whole point behind the internet was that there wasn't a single or handful of datacenters running it so that it could survive a nuclear war.

It is theoretically possible for large chunks of the internet to go down. Large datacenters like those owned by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft host large numbers of websites and data that could go offline it such a datacenter were destroyed. But most major websites have copies in multiple locations to protect against such a thing.

The most likely thing to cause a major internet failure would be a failure of the BGP protocol. This is the routing mechanism that makes the internet work underneath and is mostly controlled by ISPs.

Redundancies and protections are in place, but the major Rogers telecom outage earlier this year was an example of BGP failure. The entire ISP went offline for days because it's ability to communicate with the rest of the internet was knocked out.

This outage was the equivalent of someone removing all the street signs in a city within 10 secs and then trying to put them back without any context.

As for traffic jams, those happen all the time but are usually only affecting small segments of the web. This is like seeing a traffic jam on 1 road in the city. When the internet runs slowly or a website goes offline it's often for this reason. Companies are just good at managing bandwidth to prevent this from happening.

A DDoS attack meanwhile is an example of a malicious traffic jam. The internet equivalent of protestors blocking a road with bodies and cars.