The ENAV blackout is down to institutional culture rather than infrastructure

Whether it was a hacker or a technical fault, it makes little difference to those left stranded on the ground. The ENAV blackout shows that operational resilience remains a challenge yet to be overcome. On Friday morning, Italian airspace found itself operating at half capacity. A fault in the geographical data transmission network linking the control centres forced Enav to halve its capacity, resulting in delays and cancellations from Malpensa to Fiumicino and as far as Punta Raisi. The main concern expressed in the official statement was to rule out ‘malicious activity’. It is an understandable reassurance, but one of little practical relevance. For the passenger stranded at the gate, for the airline that has to rebook crews and connections, and for the hotel that loses a booking, a software bug and a ransomware attack cost just as much.

The issue to be discussed today, in fact, is not so much the cause as the architecture. And it’s a story we’ve seen before. On 28 June 2025, a fault in the very same E-Net network at the Milan Control Centre had grounded over 320 flights in the north-west. Both the main and backup connections, provided by the same external supplier, had failed simultaneously. Sixteen months on, network maintenance is still the responsibility of TIM, the fault is once again being attributed to the network, and the Minister for Infrastructure has already pinned the blame on the supplier: but a redundancy system based on sharing the same supplier, backbone and organisational culture is not entirely convincing. The rest of the world is no better off, but it is learning faster. In the UK, on 8 September, Nats suffered its third nationwide system failure in three years. This happened eighty-one days after the regulator had closed the final of the 34 recommendations arising from the disaster of August 2023: proof that formal compliance, ticked off on a checklist, does not equate to resilience. In the United States, the FAA’s NOTAM system went offline in January 2023 due to a file being deleted by mistake. In July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update grounded thousands of flights worldwide.

Europe, despite its proverbial regulatory slowness, has already made its diagnosis. The NIS 2 Directive on the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure obliges essential operators to manage supplier risk and ensure business continuity. The Dora Regulation requires the financial sector to carry out resilience tests and map critical dependencies, and has now become the benchmark for any infrastructure. The Italian decree transposing NIS2 came into force on 16 October 2024. The blackout marked, with unintended timing, its second anniversary, whilst evidence regarding basic security measures is expected by the end of the month. In Italy, these regulations are all too often treated merely as paperwork to be submitted to the National Cybersecurity Agency, rather than as engineering to be implemented. On boards of directors, IT remains a cost item to be cut through competitive tendering. And the labour market does not provide enough network architects and business continuity specialists to translate the regulations into operational systems.

The solution is not a call for diplomacy, nor yet another commission of inquiry, nor the ‘stellone italico’ – which, by its very nature, is not redundant. What is needed is capital: truly diversified networks, failover tests under real-world load, and contracts with suppliers that price in systemic risk. And what is needed is human capital – trained and paid what they are worth. It is not enough to merely issue a bureaucratic declaration of the operational resilience of essential services: it must be built every day, within the institutional and organisational culture even before it is embedded in the infrastructure.