Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but lots of people would die as well!
I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.
Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.
Why is it necessary to prefix/suffix a comment on the article, with an "of course, people will die and that's obviously bad, we don't want people to die, is this enough mentioning of the people dying that we can say something else without you passive aggressively implying I don't care about the people dying?"
I grew up in Central Oregon which is surrounded by fresh (geologically speaking) lava fields. I wonder if the Native Americans that were around when Mt Mazama was turned into Crater Lake worried about the disruption of their Obsidian tool making business.
The loss of life would be sad too. /s