When digital systems fail: An expert report on the hidden risks of our digital world

This expert report examines how digital infrastructure, now central to essential services such as healthcare, finance, and emergency response, is creating new forms of systemic risk through increasing interdependence. Critical digital disruptions, whether driven by natural hazards, infrastructure failure, or systemic interdependencies, can spill over at a speed and scale that existing governance frameworks are not yet designed to manage. A large-scale, escalating failure of critical digital systems, a ‘digital pandemic’, is a plausible scenario that current management frameworks are not yet designed to address.

Drawing on a co-creation process with senior expert practitioners spanning international organizations, national authorities, academic institutions, and the private sector, this report highlights six priorities for action:

1. Building the knowledge base to identify critical risks, model chain reactions, and map cross-sector dependencies;
2. Updating risk management frameworks to recognize non-intentional digital disruptions as a core risk;
3. Strengthening international standards for resilience, encouraging cooperation for analogue fallback capacity, and joint scenario planning;
4. Ramping up proactive coordination on the most acute risk vectors; enhancing societal capacity to absorb and recover from digital disruptions;
5. Building the trust, shared situational awareness, and
6. Global collaboration needed to translate early warnings into collective action.