GENEVA: A new UN report paints a sobering picture of how vulnerable modern societies are to a breakdown of critical digital infrastructure, warning of potentially severe consequences if key systems fail.
Countries are not ready for widespread satellite failures, power outages or ruptured undersea cables, the International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said on Tuesday.
"Critical digital risks are real, documented, systemic and largely underestimated,” the agencies said.
"What if, tomorrow, mobile phones and the internet stopped working, payments failed, hospitals lost patient data, and emergency alerts never arrived? What may sound like science fiction could become reality. A large-scale, escalating failure of critical digital systems, a ‘digital pandemic’, is a plausible scenario that current management frameworks are not yet designed to address."
For instance, a major solar storm could disrupt satellite navigation signals, ground flights by knocking out real-time radar, halt autonomous vehicles and cause financial transactions to fail.
Geomagnetically induced currents could damage transformers in power grids, triggering widespread outages. Data centres would face limits once backup power is exhausted, while replacing damaged transformers on a large scale could take months.
A severe heatwave would increase cooling demand while warming rivers, limiting nuclear power plant operations and reducing river transport capacity for fuel supplies.
Modern data centres could fail due to insufficient cooling. Payment terminals might stop working, forcing shop closures. Even independent mobile networks would be at risk, as many base stations cannot operate without cooling in intense heat.
A major undersea event – such as the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano near Tonga – could sever critical cables. The eruption destroyed an 80-kilometre undersea cable linking the island nation to the outside world, causing weeks-long internet outages.
Such disruptions could trigger cascading effects similar to the other scenarios, the report said.
Call for better preparedness
Risk management often treats hazards in isolation and assumes rapid recovery, the agencies said. In reality, a single disruption can cascade across interconnected systems, hitting multiple forms of critical infrastructure simultaneously.
The report calls for greater resilience, including analogue backup systems. Populations should be prepared to cope with digital disruptions using non-digital alternatives, it added. – dpa
