For all our talk of a hyperconnected world, connectivity turns out to be far more fragile than it looks.
Connectivity is far more fragile than society likes to admit. In the past few months, internet blackouts hit Pakistan-administered Kashmir, government shutdowns were imposed in Iran and Uganda, and earthquakes severed connectivity across parts of Venezuela. While the triggers were different, the outcome for those affected was the same, millions of people cut off overnight from the people they talk to whether that’s family, colleagues and customers.
These moments show that while the internet has become the default way people communicate, when it goes down, the ability to call a physical number becomes mission-critical.
These are not isolated incidents, and are in fact evidence of something that organisations have been far too slow to admit. In the last twenty years, a communication system has emerged that spans much of the world, but with almost no tolerance for failure. The internet has made communication instant, cheap and global, and lives have been built on top of that assumption without ever building for what happens when it fails.
We’ve mistaken convenience for resilience
For years, the industry’s obsession has been speed, intelligence, digitisation and capacity. Voice, messaging, payments, customer service and public services now run over the same infrastructure, but resilience hasn’t kept pace with any of it. The Uptime Institute’s 2026 Annual Outage Analysis calls this out, noting that infrastructure has become so interconnected that a single failure – a damaged cable, a power cut, a fault in one data centre – can now take down services that are, at first glance, independent of each other.
But it isn’t just that failures cascade and compound, it’s how often they happen. The reasons for these outages are numerous. Cloudflare tracked more than 180 significant global internet disruptions in 2025 alone, around one every two days.
Put those two findings together and a pattern emerges. Connectivity failure is no longer an exceptional event. Instead, it’s become part of the operating environment, but we’re still behaving as if it hasn’t.
When connectivity fails, so does certainty
Anyone who’s had their internet connection drop or latency spike knows the feeling, and it’s a reminder that connectivity is the foundation modern family life runs on. More than 300 million people now live outside the country of their birth, according to the UN, which means millions of families are held together by a phone line, not proximity.
When that line goes down, distance feels even more real. The routines that let a family function across time zones vanish without warning, and in a disaster or political crisis, an ordinary phone call becomes the only proof that someone you love is still alive. It is at these moments that connectivity is as much social infrastructure as it is digital and physical infrastructure.
This isn’t a natural disaster problem
It’s tempting to file these events under “acts of God” and move on. Some are the result of extreme weather or ageing infrastructure, others of deliberate government intervention, and while the cause changes every time, the underlying vulnerability never does. Access Now documented 313 government-imposed internet shutdowns across 52 countries in 2025, the highest total on record – proof that this isn’t a fringe risk but a routine one.
An extraordinary share of the world’s communication has been concentrated onto a small number of systems that share the same points of failure, and most organisations’ continuity plans quietly assume the network itself will always be there. That assumption no longer holds, and it’s time to start acting like it by investing in communications that work even when an increasingly fragile internet doesn’t.
Build for failure, not just success
Every piece of critical infrastructure we trust is designed assuming something will break. Hospitals run on backup power, while aircrafts are engineered on the premise that individual components will fail mid-flight. Communications infrastructure deserves the same discipline, and today it doesn’t get it.
Internet-based services have reshaped the world for the better and will keep doing so. But these moments of lost connection show that no single technology should carry the full weight of how people stay in touch with each other. Resilience has to be embedded from day one, not bolted on after an outage makes headlines.
The next connectivity challenge
We got the first part right. Having more people online, with faster connections, gives us better experiences and utility than we could have imagined a generation ago. That was the right fight but it is no longer the only one, and some conversations still only happen between people. Telling a parent their child made it home safely, reassuring a partner after a missed check-in, or closing a negotiation requires a person on the other end of a real phone line, one that works even when the internet doesn’t.
Connectivity was never just about speed or coverage. It’s about making sure that when the network fails, and it will, people can still find each other.
