We Used How Much Internet Again?

A lot of data travels over the Internet. Think about all the stuff on the internet being sent back and forth: Netflix movies, emails, chat messages, Facebook photo updates, Groupons, pirated media, and porn, being as that’s why the Internet was born according to Trekkie Monster.

But how much data do a billion or so people using the Internet constantly actually upload and download in the course of their casual Internet usage? A few hundred terabytes? Perhaps even a few hundred of the rarely seen wild petabyte?

Think bigger. In fact, think a lot bigger.

The exact total, according to a group of scientists at UC San Diego, is 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yes, that would be in the octillions.

No, that isn’t a typo. There isn’t a missing decimal there. We used 9.5 zetabytes of information. The guys measuring all this compared it to stacking books from the Earth to Neptune…and then repeating that twenty times.

More fun figures: that’s over 27 million servers, and only includes Internet usage the scientists can actually measure, namely business usage. Most of it is actually generated by machines, for machines: we never see it. It’s the hidden works that run our Internet existence.

Something to think about, the next time you fire up Amazon.