Our Critical National Infrastructure Is Possibly Not A Resilient As You Might Think

We have moved into the 21st Century, and our world embraces all the benefits that it brings, but could it all come crumbling down? What it we had a major failure of connectivity to the Internet? What would happen if parts of our energy network failed? What would happen if another country attacked critical national infrastructure? Could we cope?

Introduction

Yesterday was a strange day for me. In the morning I was giving a presentation on Brexit and Innovation in Glasgow, and then I was back in Edinburgh for my PhD’s Viva (which was a great success). But I perhaps got a glimpse of a future time where there was a major outage of the Internet. People arriving at the conference in the morning reported that their network connections to O2 were failing. Around the UK many interconnected services were failing too, including failures within card payments, and on public transport.

The data outage happened around 5:30am, and it was thought that it affected around 32 million people in the UK. Currently, O2 has over 25 million customers in the UK (26% of the market), and also supply many other providers (including GiffGaff, Sky, and Tesco). There has since been finger-pointing as to the source of the problem, with some saying that it related to a fault with…