A global network combines physical and logical layers. Physically, it consists of submarine and terrestrial fiber cables, landing stations, data centers, and the routers that forward traffic between them. Logically, it consists of agreements and protocols — transit contracts, peering arrangements, and the Border Gateway Protocol — that let independently operated networks behave as one system.
Resilience is built in through redundancy: multiple cables serve each major route, and traffic can be rerouted when one fails, though capacity may tighten until repairs finish. This design is why single failures rarely disconnect entire regions for long, and why the global network is best understood as an ecosystem rather than a single engineered artifact.