Article by Guglielmo Gnoni et al: “Europe is more reliant than ever on digital services and the infrastructure that fuels them. A prolonged systemic failure would trigger a cascade of crises: cities losing power, emergency services overwhelmed, and financial disruption.Although operators skillfully manage short-term outages and networks are built to be redundant at the core, Europe’s data infrastructure remains fragile.
Infrastructure providers, investors, and policymakers can coordinate various efforts to safeguard society from the impact of a prolonged outage, especially in a time of rising geopolitical tension.
In this article, we have used EU and industry data to model how European infrastructure would degrade in a major outage—from inconvenience in the first few hours to a systematic breakdown as the outage extends for days. We also illustrate how disruption on this scale is worryingly possible. For example, some subsea cables connecting nations to the global economy lack monitoring where they come onshore.
This “resilience gap” between Europe’s reliance on digital infrastructure and the technology’s ability to operate under stress—whether caused by human action or technical accident—is hard to close. Europe’s digital ecosystem is complex, spanning regulated national telcos and distant tech giants in Silicon Valley, India, and China. Nevertheless, Europe can go further and faster than current initiatives. Our analysis helps define the priorities for urgent action. Digital infrastructure operators, investors, and governments all have a role to play in a concerted effort to avoid prolonged outages with disastrous impact…(More)”.
