Gutenberg–Richter law for Internetquakes

The temporal behavior of the Internet is studied by performing Ping experiments. Sudden drastic changes in the Internet time series of round-trip times of the Ping signals (i.e., congestion of the network) are catastrophic and can be identified as “Internetquakes”. Magnitude of the Internetquakes is defined and the Gutenberg–Richter law is found to hold for the cumulative frequency of the Internetquakes and magnitude. Therefore, earthquakes, financial markets and the Internet share a common scale free nature in their temporal behaviors.