Only nine meals to chaos.

I wonder how many meals a global outage would add up to. It raises an interesting point (covered in the video you posted) in terms of deployment of such a cyber-weapon - unless there was a way to turn off a state's internet without it turning off yours, then it's similar to the nuclear stand-off - which is contained by the threat of mutual self-destruction. No entrenched power is gonna want to flirt with anarchy.

My limited understanding of how things work suggests that it would indeed be possible to turn off another country's internet without turning off your own. This could be done by somehow shutting down connectivity to their set of IP addresses. I suspect this could be overcome within the 9-meal period, but not easily and it would require the help, I think, of another country.

IP addresses are the root of the Internet. They are the base level information for connections.

It could also be done by attacking the DNS system. This wouldn't truly shut down the internet, but in essence it wouldn't work for anybody unless they had the IP addresses for all their sites handy. When DNS servers go down, domain names don't work. The DNS system maps domain names (like formosahut.com) to an IP address. You can look up the IP address(es) for any domain name. If more than one IP shows for a domain, it means there are mirror sites for that domain in case one server location goes down.

There's also the old fashioned way of just cutting their cables. There was an earthquake off the coast of southern Taiwan in... I want to say 2006 or 07, that severed the undersea cable there, but after the branch to Taiwan. So it didn't affect our connections, but it knocked out Hong Kong for weeks. They were able to restore very, very slow connections within a couple days by routing through some place.

Regardless, the ability to shut your adversary down, and visa versa, creates a situation similar to SAD (Self Assured Destruction.)

The difference from a nuclear attack is that a cyber-attack doesn't cause a visual explosion & a pile of charred bodies - instead it's covered in a veil of secrecy, so it may not be immediately obvious who launched it. Or it might be like Covid, where everyone knows who launched it, but it's impolitic to say.

Hmmm.... right. Sort of like what's happening in this year's Olympics!

Meanwhile, there's still a lot of incremental wiggle room between 'the big one' & smaller, targeted offensives.

I wonder how much some of these attacks are tit for tat between adversaries, sort of like boxers in a ring feeling things out. Or it could be our own governments doing it to us. One thing is for sure. We'll forever be out of the loop, and the victims.