Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around the world. The cause was quickly found: a computer networking mistake over at a specialty metals company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier that month, a similar accident took down payment terminals in The Netherlands because of a misconfiguration in a Swiss datacenter which rerouted key parts of the internet to China.