The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it? | Chris Stokel-Walker

I’ve been banging the drum about these vulnerabilities for years. It will take more than a handful of exhausted developers to keep us safe Parts of the internet are going dark. In the Netherlands, government websites, including its digital ID login service, have become unavailabl

I’ve been banging the drum about these vulnerabilities for years. It will take more than a handful of exhausted developers to keep us safe Parts of the internet are going dark. In the Netherlands, government websites, including its digital ID login service, have become unavailable.

Finland has taken public services offline, and Wikimedia, the organisation behind Wikipedia, has switched off some of its systems too. This sounds like the results of a cyber-attack. In most instances, however, the people running the sites deliberately switched them off because the alternative – keeping them online – was too risky.

The future is here, and suddenly much of our digital infrastructure is looking very fragile. Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App Continue reading...