RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA -- The Digital Cooperation Organization’s (DCO) General Secretariat said in a statement that it will hold urgent discussions with its Member States and digital economy experts to address the implications of the global IT outage that disrupted vital operations around the world, affecting critical business sectors like aviation, banking, broadcast media, software providers, and more.

The DCO General Secretariat states that “the high level of impact the world witnessed as a result of the unfortunate outage is alarming and indicates the dire need for a more effective and agile international digital cooperation.” The incident raised questions on continuity and sustainability in a world rapidly moving towards being highly dependent on digital channels and platforms. It is very crucial that the international community develops proper policies and protocols to mitigate the risks of such incidents and ensure the continuity of essential operations.

To this end, the DCO General Secretariat has called for an urgent deliberation for its Member States and digital economy experts to capture the lessons learned from this incident, assess its impact on national digital transformation plans in Member States, and plan practical steps to ensure that relevant stakeholders across sectors are aligned and ready to deal with such mishaps.