It’s December which means industry experts are making their predictions for the year ahead.

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The bad news is that experts predict the Internet will go down for 24 hours, the good news is… maybe you’ll get to leave work early that day?

Via Business Insider:

The dire forecast comes from US technology security vendor LogRhythm. According to the company’s chief information security officer and vice president James Carder, it won’t just be a technical issue stopping people from uploading their selfies on Instagram.

“In 2017, we’re going to see it hit big sometime, somewhere. If the internet goes down, financial markets will tank,” he said.

The security expert told Business Insider that all the signs were there this year, with criminals “testing missiles by shooting them into the ocean”.

“We saw the massive [distributed denial of service] against DynDNS just a couple of months ago. That DDoS attack took down sites like Twitter and Spotify for a few hours. We saw a similar DDoS hit Brian Krebs before the attack against Dyn. These were really just tests,” he said.

“If you can prove that you can take down massive sites and a large chunk of the US internet for a few hours, a 24-hour outage seems pretty easy to do?”

Carder also says the “fake news” issue is only going to get worse, with hackers targetting major media sites like CNN and Fox News:

“The power of influence is starting to shift away from main stream news outlets and I don’t think that is something those main stream outlets can afford to let happen. They will respond to the fake news threat by trying to implement some level of media control that will likely take it a little too far,” he said, citing Facebook’s post-election efforts.

“I think hackers, in the name of protecting our freedom of speech, will retaliate by knocking down a major media outlet or two.”

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Will this actually happen though? Seems a bit of a stretch to say these hackers took down major sites for a few hours, and so obviously in 2017 it means they’ll take down the whole Internet for 24 hours. But I’m not an “industry expert” like this guy so what do I know.

Let’s just hope the sex robots are ready by then.