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How big is the internet?

Victor, 8

Ketut Subiyanto via Pexels

How big is the internet?

Videos of a talking cat? Pictures of a Japanese taiko drum kit? Think of anything, however weird, and chances are you can find it online. But how much information is actually on the internet as a whole?

Bytes, kilobytes and megabytes

The internet consists of lots of pieces of digital information called ‘bytes’. A byte is just a tiny block of information. A single picture (of a Japanese drum kit, for example) consists of around 1,000 bytes or 1 kilobyte.

A single web page with text and a picture – like the cool page you are reading right now – consists of about 2 million bytes or 2 megabytes. A cat video consists of even more information: about 5 megabytes.

The internet is packed with pages that are full of photos and videos. The website WorldWideWebSize.com recently estimated that there were nearly 4 billion pages online (November 2023). All together, they consist of billions of bytes.

So how big is the whole internet? The answer is: very, very big. According to website Statista, the entire internet in 2023 consisted of up to 120 zettabytes of information. A zettabyte is 1 byte followed by 21 zeros! So that’s 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of cat videos, drum kits and answers to fun questions!

Answered by Melanie Metz

Unhackable

Quantum mechanics enables us to build an internet that cannot be hacked. Physicist Anne-Marije Zwerver of QuTech explains how this works in this video (the video is in Dutch):