UN leads call to prepare ‘for when digital systems fail’

It can be annoying when the wifi signal is cut, but what about if everything digital we rely on were to crash suddenly – from satellites to life-support systems in hospitals?

That’s the nightmare scenario that the UN is trying to avoid, in a call to all Member States to work together to avoid the cascading impacts of a “digital pandemic”.

The risks to all of us are real and they have already been observed on Earth and in space, including a solar storm that narrowly missed Earth in 2012 that could have knocked out power grids and communications across entire continents.

“The common denominator of these unintentional disruptions is their tendency to cascade with impacts that spread across sectors like finance, like healthcare, transport, energy, and communications. And this can often happen simultaneously,” warned Doreen Bogdan-Martin, head of the International Telecommunication Union, ITU.

Other risks include the alarming growth of space debris which is already threatening to make it impossible to launch satellites, which could lock us out of space.

This would jeopardize satellite navigation, financial network, and weather forecasting all at once, warns ITU, along with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR.

Both agencies add that extreme weather is growing more violent with climate change and has severed digital infrastructure entirely, turning disasters into humanitarian crises.

Cascading failures

Digital disruption is rarely contained to isolated events but instead tends to cascade, the report shows. This is underscored by data that up to 89 per cent of digital disruption linked to natural hazards are caused by secondary effects rather than the initial shock.  

“The number of people ultimately affected can be up to 10 times higher than those initially exposed” to the original incident, the UN agencies said.

The risk is systemic, said Kamal Kishore, head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). “Many of these risks are invisible. A lot of the times the interdependencies are not fully recognised.”

He warned that failures in one system can quickly ripple outward.  

“If the power systems go down...most telecom towers have a backup of nine hours and after that, it will not work. When telecoms do not work, the ATM machines do not work, [and] people do not have access to their own cash.”

Action points

Despite the risks, the report stresses that the solution is not to retreat from digital technologies as they are an essential driver of economic growth and innovation. Instead, countries should prepare 21st century workarounds for when they fail and pushing for better early warning systems.

"There is an implicit assumption that when the digital systems fail, we will have analogue systems to fall back on. But those are no longer there," said UNDRR's Mr. Kishore. "The expertise, the equipment from that is getting outdated."

“It is time to start preparing for critical digital risks more intentionally,” Ms. Bogdan-Martin stressed.

The report outlines six priority areas for action, including improving risk mapping, strengthening international standards, enhancing coordination across sectors and building the capacity of societies to absorb and recover from disruptions.

It also calls for stronger global collaboration and better use of early warning systems to translate risk awareness into action.

“This report...makes it very alive, very real,” Mr. Kishore said. “The risk of a digital disaster is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.”

Digital risks: From solar storms to extreme weather

In 1859, a powerful solar storm – the Carrington Event – disrupted telegraph systems worldwide, triggering electrical surges so intense that “sparks” flew from equipment, halting communications – the 19th century equivalent of an internet outage.

Such non-intentional disruptions remain a real threat today, warns the ITU-UNDRR report.

But risks are no longer limited to space weather. Extreme heat, storms and other climate-driven hazards are increasingly capable of damaging digital infrastructure, from power grids to data cables.

With modern societies far more dependent on digital networks, the impact of such failures could be global, rapid and far more severe.