Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what measures the Government Digital Service has in place to continue to run critical services in the event of a major internet outage.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) builds resilient critical services by operating these across multiple locations or dispersed geographies.

This underlying redundancy reduces the chance of a major outage impacting service availability.  GDS uses third-party products to build and operate our services, these are covered by contractual service-level agreements.

Whilst GDS depends on the overall stability of internet networks and availability of key providers, both service teams and the organisation actively manage business continuity plans in consideration of these factors and our technical systems and operations.