Note: Single-source report; awaiting corroboration.
The United Nations has called on all Member States to prepare for potential failures of digital systems, warning of a "digital pandemic" scenario where critical infrastructures reliant on digital technology could fail simultaneously. Such a collapse could affect satellites, hospital life-support systems, power grids, and communications networks worldwide, leading to cascading impacts across finance, healthcare, transport, energy, and communication sectors, according to Doreen Bogdan-Martin, head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Risks arise from various sources, including space weather events like solar storms, extreme heat, storms, and increasing space debris. An extreme solar storm narrowly missed Earth in 2012, and the UN highlighted the 1859 Carrington Event as a historical example where a solar storm disrupted telegraph systems globally, halting communications with electrical surges.
Modern societies are especially vulnerable due to dependence on digital networks, making potential disruptions rapid and severe. The growing accumulation of space debris also threatens satellite launches, which could impact satellite navigation, financial networks, and weather forecasting simultaneously, as noted by the ITU and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR).
Natural hazards increasingly cause digital disruptions mainly through secondary effects. UN agencies report that up to 89% of such disruptions are due to cascading secondary impacts, potentially affecting ten times more people than those directly exposed to the initial hazard. Climate change is fueling more extreme weather events, which have already caused complete digital infrastructure outages and turned natural disasters into humanitarian crises.