Related: It is really frightening to read Wikipedia's Terminal Event Management Policy article.

I honestly can't tell... is that page a joke? If not, that truly is frightening if that is really their official policy.

It's like 95% serious tone, with serious thoughts, but then every few sentences there's something really ridiculous sounding that makes me think I'm having one pulled over on me.

[Edit:] Okay, *facepalm* it is marked as humor. It was subtle enough and serious enough that I thought the absurdly stupid parts might've just been wiki-vandalism or poor attempts to inject humour into a serious topic.

Most of these replies seem to be about "how could the internet go down?" and not "what would happen if the internet went down?".

To be honest not a huge amount would change.

In the UK most of government still relies on manually filling in paper work or having hard copies of all paperwork, receipts and invoices stored for 10 years.

Police have to manually fill in paperwork as do Doctors and most Infrastructure.
Large financial trades are conducted over the telephone with market makers who traditionally refuse to use electronic communication.

HFET is done using private microwave towers rather than the internet.

Obviously some things would change.
People would find it hard to get around (too much reliance on Google Maps). Sales in old fashioned (old fashioned after only 6 - 8 years) sat navs would increase.
I would probably be out of a job :S
Obsolete communication networks such as Teletext or Prestel would be resurrected.

If the internet were to go down and never come back up it would screw things up for a while but people would get over it. It wouldn't be like the doomsday scenario in Die Hard 4.0 because contrary to popular belief not everything is on the internet.

The Internet will never die! It is our almighty god and saviour! All hail the Interwebz!!!

On a more serious note, if the internet goes down, we have more serious issues to deal with... you know, nuclear war, a huge meteor striking earth, a zombie apocalypse... or subterran Crabpeople finally rising to attack all of humanity!

I don't think any hacker or dictator not totally insane yet would try to completly bring down the internet. It would hurt them more than anyone... why has the IS gone global, but hasn't even tried any kind of hacking yet? Let alone large scale hacking attacks that would let a good portion of humanity not have access to their propaganda videos that are being distributed solely over the internet? I really wonder why...

Why are people concerned about "stone age" when the events that could cause such a thing are so devastating that you really have a more serious problem at hand than being unable to watch a monkey on youtube drinking piss and read what Kim whatshername... Kardashigan(?) or some other uninteresting person is posting on Facebook about the color of her lipstick or whatever it is.

Something that would cause an instant "stone age" scenario, such as a nuclear detonation in the ionosphere (or rather, several of them) or a massive stellar event (solar flare, asteroid, whatever) plays sooooo much in a different league. You should be thinking about things like losing agricultural surface that nourishes millions or drinkable water (from e.g. fallout) or a crater the size of New England where your house used to be, and an earthquake like you've never seen before followed by 500 years of winter, or a radical change in the atmosphere or climate or seasons. Think of events as radical as "formation of the Panama isthmus" which changed the rules for everybody during a period of a hundred thousand years.

Besides, the idea of "blasting a nation (or mankind) back to stone age" is totally silly. You can kill all reasonably modern electronic devices which aren't hardened or in a bunker relatively easily. But you can't prevent people from rebuilding them or buying replacements from another location on the globe. You can erase a great deal of information that is stored on digital media, but you won't be able to erase all (there's fortified underground archives for that exact reason), and you can't erase what's in people's heads (short of killing them).

Would it hurt the economy? Surely. Would it cause Mad-Max-like conditions with bands of rednecks looting and robbing? Possibly, even likely, especially in the Land of the Free. But it wouldn't be "stone age".