Half the internet went down today. How many warnings do we need?

It hums along almost invisibly, like electricity, until it doesn’t. Today, much of the internet stopped working due to an Amazon Web Services outage, which caused many of the world’s biggest websites and apps to go down. With this, we’ve glimpsed the brittle truth that our digital infrastructure suffers like a house of cards.

Every financial transaction, hospital record, and slice of national security rests on a tiny number of internet giants. When one element falters, the ripple effects threaten our economy, public safety and everyday life. We have seen recently how big businesses like M&S, the Co-Op and Jaguar Land Rover have been unable to operate without having access to their data. These events, now far too common an occurrence, are evidence of systemic weakness.

The fundamental issue as a result of today’s outage is that too many organisations have built their digital foundations on one cloud provider, leaving them dangerously exposed. Not least because severe disruption can cost millions in lost revenue, but it also erodes public confidence and damages reputations.

In a connected economy, the ability for organisations to instantly recover data and continue operations should be a pillar of national security. In the same way that we rely on the grid for our electricity or transport to get us around, we have to start thinking of data as fuel for the economy, which must be adequately protected to prevent a sudden, costly standstill.

Yet, while we spend billions securing physical infrastructure, we have neglected the digital systems that underpin almost every aspect of our lives. Too many companies are gambling with their data because they lack meaningful data recovery strategies, putting us all at risk.

The next steps we take are clear. Government and industry must act together to build digital resilience into the backbone of our economy. That means setting mandatory data resilience standards for critical sectors and tackling common issues like vendor lock-in or over-reliance on any single cloud service provider.

It should also encourage frameworks that include continuous data replication and synchronisation, so if systems do go offline, companies have immediate access to a real-time backup to restart services to consumers almost straight away. As much as it’s about mitigating cost in the event of disaster, every minute of downtime chips away at trust in the systems we depend on.

Resilience, and lack thereof, is a theme we will continue to see play out, and we can’t afford to wait for the next outage to teach us the same lesson twice. Our digital infrastructure deserves the same protection as the roads, rails, and grids that keep the country running because without it, the UK risks being jolted back to the dark ages.

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Stephen Kelly has led two of Britain’s biggest listed technology companies (Sage and MicroFocus), and is now building a third in Cirata (formerly WANDisco). Cirata manages huge amounts of data for companies like Tesco, Siemens and the Bank of America.

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