Bugs and blackouts: what are the risks for high-tech cities?

Like industry, cities are increasingly investing in information technology-based systems to address the challenges of managing large enterprises and enabling service innovations. While these investments often deliver rapid improvements in efficiency and operational continuity, they also create unexpected new risks: bugs and brittleness.

The growing amount of software used to manage urban infrastructure increases the likelihood of coding errors that can cause catastrophic failures, especially in highly-centralized control systems. For instance, in 2006, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit network was laid low for days when initial efforts to fix a bug inadvertently triggered a larger and longer outage.

Smart city systems also rely on many underlying technology platforms that are surprisingly brittle. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS) is not only relied on for navigation services but also serves an irreplaceable time synchronization function. Likewise, thousands of smart city apps and websites rely for their core computational capability on the cloud computing infrastructure of companies such as Amazon, which have experienced several major outages in recent years.

The brittleness of mobile cellular networks presents a special challenge to resilience for large cities. Unlike the Internet – which, at least in theory, possesses significant resilience through its multiple, redundant linkages – cellular networks have several choke points. Cell sites themselves can be damaged physically. More importantly, the supporting wired infrastructures for electrical power and “backhaul” connections to the communications grid can fail: both the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 caused damage to cellular networks that took weeks to repair. The most dangerous failure mode for cellular networks is due to congestion – during crises, panic dialling frequently overwhelms the carefully-managed wireless spectrum these networks depend on.

All levels of government will need to be more assertive in auditing and stress-testing vital digital infrastructures. The sudden and unexpected failure of these systems during crises has crippling knock-on effects across official and civilian response and relief efforts. Even during peacetime, the economic and social effects of bugs and brittleness can be devastating, with potential for long-lasting impacts. Assessments must go beyond cybersecurity, as the risks are not just about external threats but also about the fundamentally unstable dynamics of digital infrastructures and the complex, chaotic and unpredictable ways they can interact with civic, social and economic systems.

The Global Risks 2015 report is now live.

Author: Anthony Townsend is Senior Research Scientist at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.

Image: People walk underneath a giant new advertising screen in Times Square, New York, November 20, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri