This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: The Week the Sun Will Break the Internet

Redhill is the sort of English town that exists primarily to prove that not everything needs a backstory. It has parks, polite brick houses, a station that mostly works, and shops selling items you didn’t realise people still bought. You could live there for years without suspecting that history ever passed through, let alone brushed up against the end of the world.

But there is a plaque, if you know where to look.

It marks the home of Richard Carrington, a Victorian astronomer who once stared at the Sun with enough attention to notice it misbehaving. In 1859, Carrington observed a sudden, blinding flare on the solar surface. Hours later, telegraph systems across Europe and North America began sparking, shocking operators and setting paper on fire. Auroras appeared in the tropics. The Sun, it turned out, could reach across space and interfere with civilisation’s nervous system.

We call it the Carrington Event now, because historians prefer tidy labels to existential dread.

On the morning it happens again, Redhill is busy being ordinary. A dog barks at a pigeon. A jogger runs past, pursued only by regret. A commuter stares at their phone with the expression of someone who just remembered an email that began with “Per my last email.”

The first sign is not fire from the sky. It is a notification.

Not the rain app. The other one. A push alert from the UK Met Office space weather feed, which most people did not know they had installed. It reads, with exquisite British restraint: Severe geomagnetic storm watch. Potential impacts to satellites, navigation, and power systems.

No emojis. No exclamation marks. Just a polite suggestion that the Sun may be contemplating violence.

When the Sky Starts Lying

You never see the storm arrive. Space weather does not do spectacle; it does physics. The coronal mass ejection slams into Earth’s magnetic field, compressing it like a stress ball. Satellites feel it first, radiation flipping bits, electrical charge building where it shouldn’t, components experiencing conditions described in design documents as “extremely unlikely.”

The first failures are small enough to be irritating rather than alarming. Fitness trackers insist you have exercised heroically while sitting on the sofa. Satnavs confidently announce that the M25 is a lake. These are the sorts of glitches you normally blame on software updates or personal inadequacy.

Then time itself starts to wobble. GPS is not just about maps; it is how the modern world agrees what time it is. Financial transactions, mobile networks, data centres, all depend on that atomic precision. When the signal jitters, the world develops a mild, growing nausea. Calls lag. Video buffers. The internet acquires a stammer.

By evening, the sky over Surrey does something it has no business doing. A faint green shimmer ripples behind the clouds. People step outside, phone cameras raised, trying to capture something they can barely believe is real. Children are delighted. Adults whisper. Cats remain unimpressed.

The world is still standing, which is how all disasters begin.

The Quiet Death of Infrastructure

Satellites do not die heroically. They leak functionality. Some reboot and return subtly wrong, like a laptop that survived a fall but now believes you are typing in Hungarian. A few simply go silent.

On the ground, the public notices when card machines start declining. Not everywhere. Not consistently. Just enough to make queues tense and shopkeepers apologetic. Someone jokes about going back to cash; someone else realises they haven’t touched a banknote since 2019. At the station, ticket barriers refuse to open with a mute stubbornness that feels personal.

Then electricity remembers it is not magic. Transformers heat up. Protective systems trip. Grid operators perform the clever dances they trained for. For a while, it works. Then it doesn’t.

In Redhill, the lights go out mid-morning. At first, there is quiet. Then doors open. People step outside, blinking at the daylight. For a few hours, it is almost pleasant, no emails, no doomscrolling. Neighbours talk, awkwardly at first, then with forced intimacy.

Then the water pressure drops. Pumps need power. Reality does not care about vibes. People fill bathtubs. Shops reopen for cash. Coins re-emerge, sticky and mysterious. The man behind the till looks like a priest officiating the resurrection of physical currency.

The Week the World Shrinks

The internet does not vanish; it frays. Messages arrive late or not at all. “Meet me at...” turns out to require maps, which are now aspirational. Radio returns, crackling with authority.

In Redhill, someone stands by Carrington’s plaque with a torch and reads it aloud. Someone has left flowers. Someone else has left a note: Local man ruins everything.

Carrington wrote about his flare with Victorian restraint, as if he had witnessed an impolite sunrise. He could not have imagined a civilisation balanced on satellites, timing signals, and just-in-time logistics. If he were here now, he would probably be impressed. Horrified. And then, being British, he would offer tea.

Because the days after the event are not the end. They are the start of something thinner, slower, and more honest. A reminder that civilisation is not permanent. It is a maintenance schedule.

And above it all, the Sun continues to burn, brilliant, indifferent, and faintly amused, as if to say: You built a society that depends on my mood. That’s adorable.

References:

Royal Academy of Engineering, (2025). Extreme space weather: impacts on engineered systems and infrastructure. Royal Academy of Engineering, London. Available at: https://raeng.org.uk/media/lz2fs5ql/space_weather_full_report_final.pdf (Accessed: 16 December 2025).

Figueroa, M.G. et al. (2025). Geomagnetic disturbances and grid vulnerability: correlating storm activity with power outages, PLOS ONE. Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0327716 (Accessed: 16 December 2025).

Oughton, E.J. et al. (2018). A risk assessment framework for the socio-economic impacts of space weather, University of Cambridge. Available at: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/wp1801.pdf (Accesed: 16 December 2025).

Xue, D. et al. (2024). Space Weather Effects on Transportation Systems: A Review of Current Understanding and Future Outlook. Space Weather Journal, 22(12). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1029/2024SW004055 (Accessed: 16 December 2025).