You might say it was inevitable. With 50,000 satellites and over 100,000 trackable pieces of debris, Earth’s orbital zone was just too crowded for comfort. Something had to give.

Two days ago, the collision of a defunct rocket booster with a Starlink Maxi satellite caused a trail of destruction in LEO (low earth orbit). Like toppling dominoes, chunks of metal smashed into one satellite, then another, and another, spreading in a chain reaction through most of the Starlink constellation.

The dreaded Kessler Syndrome. A disaster scenario that finally became a reality.

Now there’s a chaotic belt of space junk swarming around the Earth, killing off many of the remaining weather and communications satellites, and probably military ones too.

Global internet coverage, often direct to your phone, just died. Gone is the ability to connect everywhere and anywhere, on a ship, a plane, or in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska. And it’s going to take a long time, and an awful lot of cash, to get it back.

Except for one thing. Remember all those wonderful fiber cables running underground and under the oceans? They’re back in business in a big way, and wi-fi hotspots are all the rage again. Until Starlink came along and disrupted the global networks, they were the way we all got high-speed internet.

Businesses and homes are scrambling to re-subscribe to the fiber network operators they so casually spurned as too costly in the past. And sitting in the pound seats are two tech giants who stuck with fiber throughout: Google and Amazon. Both have owned their own submarine cables and redundant fiber networks for decades, for security as well as commercial reasons.

When every other network is down, Google and Amazon are always up and running.

Contact us for more provocative scenarios

Disruption to established industries – both old and new – can come from surprising sources. If you would like to explore the possibility of disruptive challenges and opportunities for your business in the future, feel free to reach out to Futureworld Partner Louis Geeringh or the author Doug Vining.