I mean, going over the public internet gives you a pretty huge amount of redundancy. It’s common for individual companies to have outages, or one small neighborhood to have an issue, but has there ever been a global internet outage?
It doesn’t give you what POTS used to give you - several days of battery backup that kept the phone system working in the event of power failure. I remember the huge racks of lead-acid batteries in the old exchange buildings
Perhaps not completely global, but there have been some extremely widespread outages (usually from DNS or BGP misconfiguration).
- 2019: Verizon/BGP routing issue
- 2021: Verizon/FIOS routing issue
- 2021: Fastly CDN outage
- 2021: Comcast: San Francisco backbone outage
- 2021: Akamai: Edge DNS outage
- 2022: Rogers telecom routing issue
- 2023: Cloudflare: DNSSec expired certificates triggered an outage
- 2025: Cloudflare: core proxy outage