Technology and resilience: one year after the blackout, what has changed?

An opinion piece by Luís Barreiro, Board Member INCENTEA.

An energy failure, digital disruption or a problem in a logistics chain can spread quickly and affect several sectors and geographies. Risk is no longer isolated, it is shared and systemic.

April 28 marks one year since the blackout that exposed a fragility many organizations preferred to ignore: in a hyperconnected world, failure is no longer the exception. It is inevitable.

For many years, technology was associated with control. More advanced systems, greater automation and real-time data created the perception that organizations were better prepared for any scenario. However, recent events have shown the opposite: the more connected we are, the more exposed we become to cascading failures.

Resilience has stopped being a question of a company’s robustness and now depends on the position it occupies in a highly interdependent system. An energy failure, a digital disruption or a problem in a logistics chain can spread quickly and affect several sectors and several geographies. Risk is no longer isolated, it is shared and systemic.

If, on one hand, technology has brought efficiency, scale and speed, on the other it is also a vector of vulnerability. Dependence on digital platforms, shared infrastructure and continuous data flows has created organizations that are faster, but also more fragile.

One year later, the question is not technological. It is structural. The risk is rarely in the central system. It is in the less visible points: critical suppliers, little-noticed integrations or processes that no longer exist in manual form. It is at these less obvious points that operational continuity can be compromised.

The human factor is decisive. Despite growing automation, it is still people who interpret, decide and respond in moments of crisis. However, the speed of systems is not always matched by team training. When processes fail, it is people who dictate the outcome.

Organizational resilience cannot be reduced to technology or to formal contingency plans. It depends on the ability to combine robust systems with operational flexibility, clear responsibilities and a culture of rapid response. The best-prepared organizations are not necessarily the most technological ones, but those that recognize their weaknesses.

Paradoxically, many organizations continue to operate in apparently stable environments, which can lead to underestimating risk. When disruption happens, the response depends not only on the existing infrastructure, but on the ability to anticipate scenarios and test limits.

One year after the blackout, the question is not what happened. It is what has changed and, more importantly, what remains the same.

In an interconnected world, disruption is inevitable. The difference lies in how each organization reacts when everything fails.

Story published on Sapo.pt on April 29, 2026
See the original article here: Sapo Notícias