Telecom regulator Ofcom has lowered the thresholds for when Operators of Essential Services (OES) should inform the regulator of incidents, which should result in more cases of significant disruption being reported.

“Our Network and Information Systems (NIS) Guidance sets out the incident reporting thresholds for which we consider an incident to be of significant impact, and therefore when we expect OES to report incidents to us,” Ofcom said.

Several outages have occurred recently in the Digital Infrastructure subsector that were not reported to Ofcom. While they fell below the previous reporting thresholds, we believe they could have had a significant impact on the continuity of essential services.

“As a result, following public consultation, we have decided to lower the incident reporting thresholds in our NIS Guidance,” Ofcom said.

“Improved visibility of incidents impacting UK users being reported to Ofcom will enable us to better understand causes of disruption to essential services, identify significant cyber security and resilience gaps and spot thematic trends.”