Driverless cars are hitting the roads in major cities, but when they break traffic laws, police are left scratching their heads. Who gets the ticket when there’s no driver behind the wheel?
About 99% of the internet flows through undersea cables
ChatGPT
I bet you imagine the internet as a magical cloud floating wirelessly between satellites and Wi-Fi routers. Nope. It’s mostly underwater.
Nearly all of your “in the cloud” traffic actually travels through fiber-optic cables laid along the ocean floor. These thin strands of glass are buried in some places and simply resting on the seafloor in others.
So when those cables snap, you know it.
🚢 Global glitch
Earlier this month, multiple cables in the Red Sea were cut, probably by some cargo ship’s anchor. Microsoft issued a warning to Azure cloud customers about slower performance.
Folks noticed laggy video calls, stalled apps and slow-loading websites. It’s a sharp reminder that the entire internet depends on a few glass noodles running through the ocean.
⚓️ Hosed again
Most undersea internet cables are about as thick as a garden hose, roughly 1 to 2 inches wide. Inside? A bundle of glass fibers thinner than a human hair, wrapped in layers of protection: gel for insulation, steel wire for strength, Kevlar for durability, copper for power and a tough waterproof coating to survive years underwater.
Each meter (about 3 feet) of cable weighs 10 to 20 pounds, depending on where it’s going. In deep, calm ocean waters, it’s lighter. But near shorelines or rocky terrain, where the risk of damage is higher, the cable gets extra armor, and that adds weight fast.
🌊 Stats to win trivia night
About 99% of internet traffic flows through undersea fiber cables.
We’ve laid over 1.7 million kilometers (about 1.05 million miles) of these cables across oceans, and up to 200 of them are damaged every year, usually by ships or fishing gear.
💾 You’ve got no mail: Goodbye forever, dial-up. AOL finally shut down this week when traffic is up 20%. The AOL brand will live on with Italy’s Bending Spoons, who are buying it from Yahoo for $1.4B because it still pulls in ad money and subscription cash. And to honor AOL’s modem sounds, a nod to my geeky readers. Watch this video about how one guy literally daisy-chained 12 dial-up modems into a 668kbps Frankenline. Incredible.
79%
That’s how much traffic a top-ranked site can lose when it’s bumped below an AI summary. New AI Overviews are less “helpful assistant” and more “content pickpocket.” Why click a link when the robot already did the reading for you? At this point, calling it “search” is generous; it’s more like passive-aggressive copy/paste.
🍏 Better iPad multitasking: iPadOS 26 finally gives you proper window controls. Turn it on under Settings > Multitasking & Gestures > Windowed Apps. From there, use the traffic light buttons to resize, minimize or snap apps into layouts. For example, hold the green expand button (or hover with a cursor) to arrange windows into quarters.
🛬 iPad turbulence: When a Spirit Airlines flight flew too close to Air Force One over Long Island the other day, air traffic control urgently warned the pilots to turn and finally snapped, “Get off the iPad!” The FAA says the planes maintained a safe distance. Read the entire exchange here. It’s interesting.
🍏 iPadOS 26: There’s now a Mac-style menu bar. When you’re in an app, swipe down from the top to open it. Next to the traffic lights icon, you’ll see menus for everything the app can do. In Mail, for example, tap File > New Message. Works great with a keyboard and mouse, but touch does, too.
Web traffic is tanking
If your site traffic just dropped 40%, Google’s AI Overviews could be to blame. Plus, the “Hawk Tuah” girl’s rebrand and why free AI tools may not be what they seem. And here’s a warning: never use your voiceprint at the bank.
Whack-a-stream: Cops just shut down a massive Streameast copycat that pulled 1.6 billion visits last year, more traffic than Twitter. The site streamed 10,000 illegal sports events and laundered $6.2M through a fake UAE company before Egyptian police raided it and arrested two guys. Plot twist: the real Streameast? Still online. Still streaming.
🚨 Runway crash alarms: Ever wonder how pilots know if another plane’s about to cut them off on the runway? Spoiler: They don’t. Honeywell’s testing a new system that yells, “Traffic on runway” 30 and 15 seconds before disaster. Considering we had 1,664 runway oopsies last year, I’d say it’s about time planes got their own version of Waze.
🧨 The dronepocalypse starts now: New FAA rules (Part 108) will nix those tedious waivers and unlock drone flights over people, at night and out of sight. Great for commercial use like deliveries or for agriculture. Awful for an air traffic control system still running on floppy disks. Also: D.C. just let drones fly in the capital.
🛻 I think he might be right: Waze’s cofounder thinks Gen Beta (those born from 2025 to around 2039) won’t ever touch a steering wheel. With Tesla and Waymo pushing robotaxis, Uri Levine says the future is all self-driving, and maybe mobile shoe stores. So yeah, traffic might just be a bunch of vans selling Crocs.
37 out of 50
That’s how many top news sites saw traffic drop after Google’s AI took the wheel. Despite wild headlines covering assassination attempts, election chaos and tariff wars, users stayed on the search page. Why? Google’s Gemini bot summarizes the news, grabs the eyeballs and leaves publishers ghosted like a bad Tinder date.
Best times to drive on July 4
Nearly 62 million people will be on the road. Here’s how to dodge the worst traffic.
$4.20 flat fee
What it costs to ride Tesla’s new robotaxi in Austin, Texas. Right now, about 10 self-driving Model Ys are on the road, with a Tesla employee riding shotgun just in case. Elon says 1,000 more are coming in the next few months, with San Francisco and LA up next (paywall link). Good luck, traffic.
Search cannibalism: I called it three years ago. As the once search giant Google morphs into a chat-style (paywall link) “answer engine,” clicks are drying up and traffic is cratering all over. The Atlantic’s CEO said to assume “Google traffic drops to zero.” Google once said, “Don’t be evil.” Today, it reminds me of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son.”
Floppy air control: Terrifying fun fact, U.S. air traffic control still partially runs on actual floppy disks and Windows 95. And yep, Newark’s had three major outages in five weeks. The FAA wants a $10B-ish tech glow-up, but politics and duct tape might kill the plan before takeoff. If Clippy pops up mid-landing, we’re all in God’s hands.
🚦 You have unpaid tolls: No, you don’t. DMVs in NY, FL, CA and elsewhere are warning about scammy texts pretending you owe traffic fines. They threaten to yank your license. Spoiler alert: It’s fake. Don’t click the links, unless you really want scammers to know your SSN.
1.2 million
Extra fast-food visits happen in LA County each year. Why? Sitting in traffic makes people way more likely to hit the drive-thru than the grocery store. Makes sense when the average American spends 37 minutes prepping food, and fast food takes under five. So much for that salad plan.
22%
That’s how much of its workforce Chegg is laying off because of AI. Students are skipping the homework-help site and heading straight to tools like ChatGPT. With traffic and subscriptions tanking, cutting costs will save up to $110 million by 2026. Study guides couldn’t prep them for this.