4th September 2026
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and discovering that the internet has disappeared.
Not your broadband connection - Not your Wi-Fi but the internet itself.
Your phone still works as a phone. The electricity is still on. Your television may still broadcast. Your car still starts.
But anything that requires an internet connection simply refuses to work.
At first, most people probably wouldn't be particularly worried.
They would assume there was a problem with their broadband provider.
They would restart the router and they would check their phone. They might walk around the house trying to find a signal. Then they would discover that nobody has a connection.
And that is when Britain would begin to realise just how much of everyday life now depends upon something that, until relatively recently, didn't exist at all.
The first few hours would be confusing
The first victims would probably be businesses trying to open for the day. Card machines might not work. Online banking would be unavailable.
Businesses that depend upon cloud-based software could suddenly find that their systems were inaccessible.
Online orders would stop.
Websites would disappear.
Email would stop.
Social media would stop.
People working from home would discover that "working from home" becomes considerably more difficult when there is no network connecting them to their employer.
Some businesses could continue using locally stored systems.
Others might find themselves almost completely paralysed.
And there would be an immediate problem that is easy to overlook.
How would anybody know what was happening?
The usual answer would be to look online.
Except there would be no internet.
The high street would discover the value of cash
The disappearance of the internet would expose another interesting change in British life.
We have gradually moved towards a society in which paying for something with a piece of plastic or a mobile phone has become normal.
But card payments depend upon communications infrastructure.
If the systems required to authorise transactions cannot communicate, a perfectly healthy bank account could become temporarily useless.
A shop could have £10,000 worth of stock.
A customer could have £2,000 in their bank account.
And yet neither might be able to complete a simple £20 transaction.
Cash would suddenly become much more valuable.
People who happened to have some notes and coins in their wallets might discover that they had something extremely useful.
People who had gradually stopped carrying cash might discover that their apparently convenient cashless lifestyle had a weakness.
There would probably be a rush to find cash.
Except ATMs could present another problem if they depend upon network connections to communicate with banks.
The irony would be extraordinary.
We have spent years being encouraged to become increasingly digital.
Then one missing piece of infrastructure could make an old £10 note suddenly more useful than a smartphone.
Supermarkets would have a problem
The supermarket is another place where the internet has quietly become embedded in everyday life.
Stock management is increasingly digital.
Orders are placed electronically.
Warehouses communicate with stores.
Delivery systems are coordinated digitally.
Online grocery shopping obviously depends upon connectivity.
Even the humble barcode on a product can be part of a much larger electronic system.
If the internet disappeared for 24 hours, supermarkets would not necessarily empty immediately.
They have physical stock sitting on shelves.
But the system that keeps those shelves replenished could be badly disrupted.
And then there is the checkout.
If card payments cannot be processed, supermarkets face a very basic question.
How do you sell the food?
They could potentially fall back on alternative systems and offline procedures, depending upon how their payment infrastructure is designed.
But doing so on a national scale would be very different from dealing with the occasional payment-system failure.
For consumers, queues could quickly become the visible sign of a much bigger problem.
Then we would discover how dependent transport has become
Airports would face enormous problems.
Airline reservations, passenger information, baggage systems, communications and operational systems are heavily dependent on digital networks.
Railways would face their own challenges.
Some trains could continue operating using systems that do not depend directly upon the public internet.
But disruption to communications, ticketing, passenger information, maintenance systems and business operations could quickly spread.
And Britain's roads would not be immune.
Sat-nav systems might still have some functionality because GPS itself is not the internet.
But the live information people increasingly rely upon for traffic, road closures and journey planning could disappear.
Delivery drivers would have another problem.
A modern delivery network does not simply involve putting a parcel into a van.
It involves constantly updating information about where parcels are, where vehicles are, what has been delivered and what needs to happen next.
The physical world would still exist.
But the information connecting it together would suddenly be missing.
Banks would be one of the biggest concerns
Britain's banking system is perhaps where the consequences become particularly serious.
Most people now interact with their bank through an app or website.
Branches have disappeared from many communities.
Cash machines have declined.
Telephone banking still exists, but even banks' internal systems depend upon sophisticated communications networks.
A 24-hour internet outage would therefore be very different from a few years without online banking.
The financial system itself is heavily digital.
Banks, businesses and financial markets exchange enormous amounts of information electronically.
A prolonged disruption would not simply inconvenience customers.
It could interfere with the machinery through which money moves around the economy.
That is why cyber attacks against financial institutions are taken so seriously.
The threat is not necessarily that somebody steals your money.
The bigger danger can be that the systems which tell everybody where the money is temporarily stop working.
What about hospitals?
This is where our thought experiment becomes much less amusing.
Modern healthcare depends heavily upon digital information.
Patient records.
Appointments.
Laboratory results.
Prescriptions.
Communications.
Diagnostic systems.
Staff rotas.
Supplies.
Many hospitals have systems designed to continue operating during outages and cyber incidents.
But a national internet failure lasting 24 hours would be a very different scale of event.
Healthcare organisations would undoubtedly have contingency arrangements.
Paper records and alternative communications have not completely disappeared.
But the exercise would reveal something important.
A modern hospital is not simply a building full of doctors and nurses.
It is also an enormous information-processing organisation.
And if the information stops moving, the consequences can become serious.
Small businesses could be among the hardest hit
This is particularly relevant to the readers of a business publication.
A large corporation may have its own networks, backup systems and IT departments.
A small business may have a laptop, a cloud accounting package, an online banking app and a card reader.
That can be remarkably efficient.
Until it isn't.
The small business revolution of the past two decades has been partly enabled by the internet.
You don't need a huge IT department.
You can use cloud accounting.
You can advertise through social media.
You can sell through an online marketplace.
You can take card payments.
You can communicate with customers by email.
You can order stock online.
You can run much of a business from a laptop.
That has lowered barriers to entry.
But it has also created a dependency.
A small business might have become incredibly efficient while simultaneously becoming incredibly vulnerable to an infrastructure failure.
And rural Britain has another problem
This is where the thought experiment becomes particularly interesting for places such as Caithness.
We already know that connectivity is not uniform across Britain.
Some communities have fast fibre connections.
Others still struggle with poor broadband or mobile coverage.
That means the digital revolution has never been experienced equally everywhere.
But there is a paradox.
Rural communities are increasingly being told that digital connectivity can overcome their geographical disadvantages.
Remote working means you don't necessarily have to live beside your employer.
Online shopping means you don't necessarily need a large town nearby.
Digital banking means you don't necessarily need a bank branch.
Online government services mean you don't necessarily need a government office.
All of that can be true.
But it also means that the internet has become part of the infrastructure keeping rural communities connected to the rest of the economy.
Remove it for 24 hours and some of those geographical disadvantages would suddenly return.
The internet has effectively become another road, another railway and another form of communication.
We simply don't think of it that way.
What would happen to Amazon?
This is where the experiment gets interesting from a business perspective.
Amazon's warehouses would still exist.
The products would still be sitting there.
Delivery vans would still be available.
Workers would still be there.
But the enormous information system connecting customers, warehouses, stock levels, payments and deliveries would be disrupted.
The same would apply to countless online businesses.
For 24 hours, the world's largest digital marketplace would become a collection of physical buildings full of goods.
That would tell us something profound about the modern economy.
The internet doesn't replace the physical economy. It coordinates it.
Without it, the factories, warehouses, shops, lorries and offices would still exist.
But coordinating all those things would become much harder.
Advertising would suddenly disappear
For businesses, another strange thing would happen.
Google searches would disappear.
Facebook would disappear.
Instagram would disappear.
Online advertising would disappear.
Email newsletters would disappear.
Websites would disappear.
For one day, businesses would be forced back into an older world.
Telephone.
Posters.
Newspapers.
Radio.
Word of mouth.
The telephone would suddenly look remarkably modern.
And perhaps some businesses would discover something else.
Their customers still know where they are.
They still know their phone number.
They still know their name.
They may even walk through the door.
That could be an interesting lesson in itself.
The government would have a serious problem
The Government would need to communicate with the public.
But its websites would be unavailable.
Online services would be unavailable.
Social media announcements would be unavailable.
Millions of people would immediately want to know what had happened.
The authorities would have to rely upon television, radio, telephone networks and conventional broadcasting.
That would be a reminder of why governments continue to maintain older communication systems.
You don't maintain them because they are fashionable.
You maintain them because one day you might desperately need them.
Would Britain actually survive?
Of course it would.
A 24-hour internet outage would be enormously disruptive, but Britain would not suddenly cease to function.
Electricity would continue to be generated.
Water would continue to flow.
People would still be able to drive cars.
Food would still exist.
Hospitals would continue treating patients.
Telephone networks could provide alternative communications.
Radio and television could still reach millions.
And human beings are remarkably adaptable.
Businesses would improvise.
Employees would use paper.
Customers would use cash.
People would telephone each other.
Some of us might even discover that we remember each other's telephone numbers.
The biggest impact would probably not be physical destruction.
It would be confusion.
Modern society has become incredibly good at moving information around.
Take the information away and everything becomes slower.
After 24 hours, something rather strange might happen
When the internet eventually returned, there would probably be an enormous collective sigh of relief.
Messages would flood in.
Emails would arrive.
Online orders would resume.
Bank accounts would update.
Social media would explode with people describing what had happened.
But there might also be a short period of reflection.
People might ask themselves how dependent they had become.
Businesses might look more seriously at their contingency plans.
Some might discover that their backup arrangements weren't nearly as good as they had assumed.
And governments would probably review the resilience of critical infrastructure.
Because the most important lesson would not be that Britain needs the internet.
We already know that.
The lesson would be that Britain needs alternatives to the internet.
We have built an extraordinarily efficient system
There is a bigger economic lesson here.
Over the past 30 years, Britain has become extraordinarily efficient.
Businesses can communicate instantly.
Money can move around the world in seconds.
Goods can be ordered automatically.
Stock can be monitored in real time.
Customers can buy something at midnight and have it delivered the following morning.
A business in Caithness can sell to somebody thousands of miles away.
A person living in a remote village can work for a company based in London.
These are remarkable achievements.
But efficiency often comes at the cost of resilience.
The more tightly interconnected a system becomes, the more difficult it can be to operate when one of its essential connections disappears.
We have spent decades removing friction from the economy.
The internet removed an enormous amount of friction.
But perhaps we have also removed some of our redundancy.
The 24-hour test
So perhaps there is a useful exercise for every business owner.
Imagine that at 8am tomorrow morning you lose internet access.
Not for five minutes.
Not for an hour.
For the entire day.
Could you still take orders?
Could you still take payments?
Could you contact your customers?
Could your employees work?
Could you access your accounts?
Could you obtain your stock?
Could you pay somebody?
Could you prove that you had paid somebody?
Could you operate for a second day if the problem continued?
You might be surprised by the answers.
And that is probably the most useful thing about this thought experiment.
We tend to think of resilience as having insurance, a fire extinguisher or a backup generator.
Perhaps we should now regard having a way to operate without the internet as part of business resilience too.
And perhaps we should occasionally remember the world before it
The internet has transformed Britain.
It has made businesses faster.
It has made information almost instantly available.
It has opened markets to small companies that previously could never have reached them.
It has made life easier in countless ways.
But it has also become so deeply embedded in everyday life that we barely notice it anymore.
That is usually when infrastructure becomes most important.
We notice the road when it closes.
We notice the electricity when it fails.
We notice the water supply when the taps stop working.
And if Britain ever lost the internet for 24 hours, we would suddenly notice something else.
We would discover that the internet isn't really a separate part of modern life anymore.
It has become part of the infrastructure of modern life itself.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not whether Britain could survive without the internet for 24 hours.
It is this:
If we couldn't, what would that tell us about the way we have built our economy?
The Defence Lesson
Our Digital Dependence Is Also a Vulnerability
The most uncomfortable conclusion from this thought experiment is that the internet outage does not have to be an accident.
A major cyberattack, disruption to communications infrastructure, damage to undersea cables, interference with satellites or a sufficiently sophisticated attack on critical computer systems could potentially create many of the same effects. The difference would be that someone would have deliberately caused them.
That changes the defence question.
For decades, national security has concentrated heavily on protecting physical infrastructure and preparing for conventional military threats. But modern economies have developed another layer of infrastructure above the physical world. Banks depend on computer networks. Supermarkets depend on digital stock and payment systems. Energy companies depend on control systems and communications. Hospitals depend on electronic records and connected equipment. Businesses depend on cloud computing. Governments increasingly depend on online systems.
Much of that infrastructure is invisible to the public until it stops working.
This means resilience has to become part of defence thinking. It is not enough to ask whether Britain can defend its military bases, aircraft carriers and airfields. We also need to ask whether the country can continue functioning if some of its digital infrastructure is deliberately disrupted.
That means maintaining the ability to operate without the internet when necessary. Businesses need contingency arrangements. Banks and retailers need alternatives when electronic payments fail. Government needs ways of communicating when digital channels are unavailable. Hospitals need systems that can continue operating when networks are compromised. Critical infrastructure needs protection and, just as importantly, the ability to recover quickly.
There is another uncomfortable issue. The more advanced our technology becomes, the more dependent we can become upon it.
Artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, smart electricity grids, digital banking and highly automated supply chains can make a country more efficient and more capable. But they can also create more points at which disruption can occur.
The defence challenge of the future therefore may not simply be about having better weapons than an opponent. It may be about ensuring that society can continue functioning when somebody tries to switch parts of it off.
That is why a 24-hour internet outage should not be dismissed as an amusing thought experiment. It is a test of national resilience.
And perhaps the most important question Britain should ask is not "Could we survive without the internet for a day?"
It is "Could we survive if somebody wanted us not to?"