What is ‘digital pandemic’?

• As digital systems become ever more central to our lives, the risks that threaten them increasingly transcend sectors, institutions, and borders. 

• Critical digital disruptions, whether driven by natural hazards, infrastructure failure, or systemic interdependencies, can spill over at a speed and scale that existing governance frameworks are not yet designed to manage.

• What if, tomorrow, mobile phones and the internet stopped working, payments failed, hospitals lost patient data, and emergency alerts never arrived? 

• 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.

• Modern society runs on critical digital infrastructure: From electricity, finance and transport to healthcare, communication and government services. 

• Everything depends on deeply connected systems that are more fragile than they appear, and whose risks remain largely overlooked. 

Carrington Event

• In September 1859, a solar storm, an extraordinary burst of energy and charged particles from the Sun, struck Earth. Telegraph operators in Europe and North America received electrical shocks. 

• Sparks flew from telegraph equipment, setting some offices alight. Auroras were visible even at tropical latitudes. 

• The event entered history as the Carrington Event, named after the British astronomer who observed it. 

• At the time, the telegraph was the Internet. Although the damage was severe, the infrastructure was relatively easy to rebuild, and broader societal functions continued largely unaffected. 

• A solar storm of the magnitude that narrowly missed Earth in 2012 could have knocked out power grids and communications across entire continents. 

• Growing space debris already threatens to push Low-Earth Orbit toward failure, jeopardising satellite navigation, financial networks, and weather forecasting all at once. 

• Extreme weather, which is growing more violent with climate change, has already shown its capacity to sever digital infrastructure entirely, turning disasters into humanitarian crises.

• Space weather is not integrated into national disaster risk registers in most countries. 

• 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.

• 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.

Cascading failures

• Digital disruptions rarely remain isolated events. They cascade. 

• What begins with a local failure can rapidly spread across sectors and borders.

• Up to 89 per cent of digital disruptions from natural hazards are caused by secondary spillover effects rather than the initial damage. 

• The number of people ultimately affected can be up to ten times higher than those initially exposed to the initial event.

• Digital risks often remain invisible until they reach a critical threshold. Systems simply stop working while our physical world is seemingly unaltered. This may delay crisis response when action matters the most.

• Meanwhile, our ability to cope without digital systems has eroded. Across sectors, analogue skills and fallback options have disappeared or are no longer tested. 

• When systems fail at scale, manual alternatives often cannot replace them. 

• However, the severity of this challenge varies significantly across contexts: Countries with more limited infrastructure redundancy, including small island developing states and least developed countries, face distinct and in some cases more acute vulnerabilities.

• A critical gap persists in how risks are understood. Cyber threats attract significant attention, but non-intentional disruptions of material infrastructure follow different dynamics. 

• The knowledge exists, but we are not paying sufficient attention. And even when we do, we lack the necessary frameworks, standards, and coordination capacities needed to turn that knowledge into preparedness.

Action points

• Addressing these risks requires action across six priorities, identified through a co-creation process with senior expert practitioners spanning international organisations, national authorities, academic institutions, and the private sector.

They are:

1) Building the knowledge base to identify critical risks, model chain reactions, and map cross-sector dependencies.

2) Updating risk management frameworks to recognize non-intentional digital disruptions as a core risk.

3) Strengthening international standards for resilience, encouraging cooperation for analogue fallback capacity, and joint scenario planning.

4) Ramping up proactive coordination on the most acute risk vectors. Enhancing societal capacity to absorb and recover from digital disruptions.

5) Building trust, shared situational awareness.

6) Global collaboration needed to translate early warnings into collective action.