The disappearance of hugely popular sites is a reminder that we need to improve our approach to critical infrastructure
In Rumaan Alam’s apocalyptic novel Leave the World Behind, a protagonist notices a news alert warning of a major blackout: “She jabbed at it, but the application did not open, just the white screen of the thinking machine. This was a specific flavor of irritation.” To the character, Amanda, it is merely an inconvenience. But the reader already understands that something is very wrong. The sudden severance of communications is ominous.
The novel gained an eerie sense of prescience by being published in the middle of the pandemic. Similarly, Tuesday’s massive internet outage, which saw news and other hugely popular sites around the world vanish, was perhaps more disconcerting for a public primed by Covid to the abrupt disruption of things we took for granted. The Guardian, the New York Times, the BBC, the Financial Times, CNN and Le Monde were all hit, along with internet behemoth Amazon, the Gov.uk site in Britain, PayPal and Reddit. What or who was responsible?
