We need contingency plans to protect us from internet outages and cyber attacks

Editorial: It was a shock to see how the failure of one link in the web could cause quite so much chaos

On 8 June, major websites including ‘The Independent’ went down (Getty Images)

“The edge cloud platform behind the best of the web,” is how Fastly describes itself. It’s fair to say that the claim hasn’t aged well, as they say on the internet. Even the most technologically backward of web users will, as of yesterday, be familiar with the now ironically-named web server company.

The better news that emerged from a day of catastrophic, and costly outages (including of The Independent’s website), is that the disruption was not, on this occasion, the work of sovereign entities or malicious players. Though on a mega-scale, it seems to be more like the kind of “server down” mishap that IT departments have to deal with all the time.

Even so, it was something of a shock to see how the failure of one link in the web could cause quite so much chaos quite so, well, “fastly”. Governments, companies, media companies and millions of individuals were caught up in the mess, and it soon became apparent that it was difficult for many of them to communicate en masse with their users, though social media and email were unaffected.

Everyone understands, intuitively, that much of their lives now rely on secure and reliable IT infrastructure, but it took an event such as this to perhaps bring home the full extent of our modern dependency. In recent years, malicious ransomware and other software attacks on everything from the NHS to the Pentagon to the US internal oil pipelines have been reminders of the west’s vulnerability.

Like physical infrastructure, such as water supplies, electricity, roads and railways, the web is prone to periodic failures; but what seems to be lacking with digital infrastructure is the confidence that the public or private sectors have much of an idea of how to plan for, and resolve, such probable status.

Perhaps it is impossible to do so, because the nature of the beast means that criminals and rogue states will always try to be one step ahead, and advances in software will necessarily produce fresh weaknesses and flaws. If that is the case, though, then there is all the more reason for households, companies and public bodies to have a fallback plan.

When the NHS was cyber attacked by the WannaCry network, doctors and nurses resorted to using pen and paper and their own phones so that they could attend to patients in urgent need. That is an extreme but instructive example of “last resort” systems in situations that cannot wait for more elegant solutions.

Like the Covid pandemic, such widespread catastrophic failures of the web are the kind of phenomenon that demand some sort of contingency planning, even if it is bound to be inadequate and out of date by the time it is needed.

The great energising strength of the internet is the way it has grown largely unregulated and driven entirely by the needs of its users. Only a decade or two into this revolution, its potential is far from being fully exploited, and how phenomena such as cyber currencies, the dark web and artificial intelligence will impact mankind for good or ill, can only be glimpsed at.

The question raised so often in science fiction is becoming more real – what is controlling it all?