This is a warning

We take modern digital connectivity for granted - too for granted. We are woefully ill-prepared for inevitable and possibly catastrophic outages.

I have been reading more and more about digital fragility. The more you read the more you become aware of how many potential failure points exist in our communications and energy infrastructure these days. But what I have been wondering throughout this is what the experience of digital collapse would be like.

Well, let me tell you.

Last Wednesday my town lost all connectivity to the outside world other than roads. What I understand happened is that a utilities company accidentally cut through a data cable which caused a short which resulted in burning of the cable in the ground up the high street. The outcome was that from Penicuik to Douglas (which is over 35 miles) there was absolutely no phone lines, no mobile phone signal and no internet.

This happened some time around midnight the preceding night. We all awoke to – nothing. There was simply no communications of any sort. You couldn't find out what was happening because any conceivable means you might have used to find out what was going on was on the blink.

In fact I only discovered that this is what had happened in the afternoon when my mother drove up to our house to ask if we had any communications (I had thought it was just us). This is when I started to learn what was happening.

For a start, the whole town was instantly cash-only. Not a single shop could operate a card reader. Unfortunately, none of the cash machines were working. The bank staff were great and stood outside the bank all day explaining to people that the bank couldn't open. Someone I know described the scene of a group of elderly ladies waving cheque books, unable to understand (at first) that it wasn't just the cash machines, it was the tills, the systems – everything.

I happened to have a doctor's appointment. The clinic was in chaos. The doctors had no access to any patient records (other than notes from in the practice), couldn't refer anyone, couldn't register anything. They couldn't even call 999. There was one emergency phone in the local cottage hospital that could get 999 but you literally had to run up the road to get to that one emergency phone.

I am delighted that the schools stayed opened but if I'm honest, in the modern climate, there is not a hope in hell you could have risk assessed that. The fire alarm was hard-wired to the fire station but other than that, they were cut off from the world. If a child had a seizure, literally the only option would have been to pick them up and run down the street to the medical centre with them.

And to be honest, given that we have a part-time fire service and an unstaffed station, it isn't completely clear to me if the fire fighters could have been contacted anyway.

The town shifted quickly to a complex, ad hoc system of paper IOUs – in the shops that didn't just give up and call it a day. This was one thing to see in our local greengrocer which has a loyal regular customer base, but the poor staff at the Coop supermarket were left to somehow invent a new economic model all by themselves over an hour one Wednesday morning.

That is one of the most disconcerting things about it all. It became clear to me very quickly that there was not a single organisation anywhere in the whole town which had a protocol for dealing with what was happening. Like the pandemic, if our local authority did anything, I didn't see it. It wasn't even clear when the council knew this was happening.

Certainly the bank staff, the health centre staff, the shop owners and the schools were all left to make things up as the went along without any guidance of any description. It was a kind of serene anarchy.

The other most disconcerting thing was that I don't think any of us at all were mentally prepared for how isolated we each were – even when within metres of each other. It's not just that there was no way to get any official information on what was going on, if you did get any scraps of information there was no way to share it.

Rumours were rife. I heard of two dates for restoration of service which were 72 hours apart. The one that was badly wrong was the education official who finally learned what was going on and got in touch with BT. The one that got it right? Would it surprise you if I told you it was my barber? It was truly Victorian – it was the barber who was acting as the brokerage for information largely gleaned from customers quizzing the teams of workmen in the high street.

We are all so used (too used) to the rapid, easily-accessible dissemination of information. I spoke to people who were struggling to reconcile the idea that this system of communication had simply collapsed. The number of theories I heard on how we should have provided information to each other which were predicated on there being a means to provide information...

“We are a digitally-captive population which relies on venal private corporations for our survival”

The service cut out at we think midnight on Tuesday-to-Wednesday and was finally restored at teatime on Thursday. It was only two working days, and yet it took days and days to resolve our new trading system with the settling of debts. At times it felt like we were only a couple of days away from an improvised barter system.

I had no option but to drive over to Lanark to a cafe that turned out to be packed with other broadband refugees. It was only yesterday that I discovered that a village four miles from me never lost their connection (the loss of service was almost literally in a single straight line).

There is loads more of this picture I could paint. But I want to stress one overwhelming point – after two working days with communication cut off, you could feel the normal operation of our community breaking down. It wasn't scary because it wasn't off for that long and it wasn't that far to get to some kind of communications.

But I have been slightly chilled by the thought of what this would have meant if there had been a wider geographical service loss, or a longer interruption, or even a national level outage. Having experienced it I can warn you that we are not even nearly ready for it. We have built our civilisation on a pile of archaic code dating from 1989 running through cables a couple of centimetres thick which connect us to the world via two undersea cables which are on the map, all of which is wide open to hackers...

I cannot begin to tell you how ill-prepared we are for a full digital outage. If a hostile power hacks our energy system the whole thing could go down for an extended period of time. We'd be scrambling to maintain order.

I can give you some simple, immediate suggestions. First of all, we need protocols for this at every level of society. From a supermarket to the NHS, we don't have time to make it up as we go along after the worst has happened. People need step-by-step instructions on what the hell to do in an outage. This cannot be optional, like a health and safety plan can’t be optional.

Second of all, whoever turned off the copper phone lines should be arrested. To have all our communications going through one single point of failure (which itself has a plethora of points of failure) is foolhardy. I don't know what feasibility there is in having some form of reliable communication hub that does not depend on broadband but it would be grim if this happened at a larger scale.

I've said it before – resilience isn't AI, it's walkie talkies. Old-school solutions are reliable in the face of external duress. We will need them one day, I'm almost certain. Allowing Facebook to be our primary means of public communication for communities is outright reckless. Assuming it will always be there and always be working for us is stupidity.

There needs to be some kind of social infrastructure in communities. They are closing the Royal Mail depot in our town because our privatised society is falling apart, but there should have been some method of getting leaflets into people's doors to tell them what was happening and what to do in an emergency. I can only get you to imagine a road accident or someone having a serious and incapacitating medical condition during this outage. I do not know what anyone would or could have done.

Yes, we need to invest in cyber security, but that is wishing away a problem or reducing its likelihood a bit. It is not a solution and it is not protection. I increasingly think that nations which don't have wholly-public systems managed and controlled by a single agency are in trouble. Having society rely on a patchwork of private business interests just to be able to phone a doctor is madness.

I really, really think we need to move to open source platforms and nationalise communications networks and the National Grid. This is life or death stuff and I cannot be the slightest interested in press releases about corporate profits or (god help us) foreign direct investment. I want an elderly woman who lives with her partner who has a stroke not to be sitting in her house with the prostate body, totally unable to do anything or contact anyone other than wandering into the street and shouting.

This is clearly not a sufficient package of measures. It is not that much more than preparing for when (if) the worst happens. Perhaps it won't. Last Tuesday night we were confident as could be that we'd wake up, get breakfast and have the internet and phones. That confidence was misplaced.

But where we stand at the moment is hanging over a precipice secured only by some fibre optic cable and the faith-based assumption that it definitely won't break. Well I've seen what it looks like when it breaks and disconcerting is only the beginning.

We are a digitally-captive population which relies on venal private corporations for our survival. In the cold light of the dawn we faced here, this feels like rank stupidity. The means of our survival are privatised for the profit of the rich. They cut corners to boost the bottom line. It is a threat to the life of every single one of us. Don't wait until it happens.