Parliament effectively shut down yesterday, though not because of the usual reasons (recess, prorogation, or it’s just an average Friday). Instead, a “catastrophic” IT failure across the palaces meant MPs and peers couldn’t access their emails, computers, constituency work or online meetings from lunch time to the evening. Though at least it meant our politicians had to get off their phones for once. Zuckerburg and Bezos may have noticed a decline in usage...

Concerns arose that it might be a cyber attack due to the extensive outage, which required several hours to resolve. However, House of Commons authorities have vehemently denied this, instead citing “human error” for the failure. Given our fine politicians’ track record, the latter reason comes as no surprise…