Digital infrastructure breakdowns are glitches, lags, disruptions and cyber-attacks throughout the internet and telecommunication network. In this project, we suggest, that they are, against common understanding, rarely sudden and devastating events, but occur every day, are well-known, expected, and slowly emerging. As such they can be observed ethnographically by attending to everyday practices of managing, repairing, and maintaining of digital infrastructures. DigiBreak studies such practices across the Danish-Greenlandic digital communication infrastructure.

Digital infrastructure breakdowns are relevant sites of unfolding practical consequences of rising security threats, especially in tech-reliant societies. By foregrounding everyday encounters with glitchy connections, old software and hardware, lagging wi-fi or constant cyber-attacks, we draw attention to normal and everyday ways of handling brokenness of digital infrastructures. In addition, practices and norms for how we should handle digital infrastructure breakdowns conflict and vary across sites – organizations, communities, countries - which calls attention to the fact that the mitigation of glitches, cyberattacks or lags can never be fully standardized, but is always characterized by normative ideals about what constitutes breakdowns and the proper handling of them.

DigiBreak aims to provide ethnographic insights about digital infrastructure breakdowns through interviews, participant observation and document analysis, following breakdowns as they are practiced, described or responded to across numerous contexts. The ethnographic study of digital infrastructure breakdowns presents several methodological challenges, as breakdowns are part of the everyday handling of things. They are rarely dramatic or easy to locate, and it is often unclear for actors when and how to properly respond to them. The project therefore involves careful ethnographic attention to uneasy practices of waiting, making compromises, or postponing action in the handling of breakdowns.

The project investigates digital infrastructure breakdown across the interlinked Danish-Greenlandic telecommunication and internet infrastructure. We look at three sites in particular: 

• Work Package 1: Governmental agencies in Denmark and Greenland who advise on how to avoid, prepare for or respond to breakdown.
• Work Package 2: Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Denmark and Greenland that handle various cyber-attacks and aging or convoluted IT systems with limited resources and technical expertise. 
• Work Package 3: Citizens and small communities in satellite areas in Greenland that coordinate collective responses to unstable or limited internet connections. 

Each work package encounters digital infrastructure breakdowns in specific social and organisational contexts. They differ in how breakdowns are noticed, registered, managed, coordinated, and endured. In fact, the sites do not always agree on what is best to do about breakdowns, but stand in tension, partial agreement, or conflict with each other.  The aim is to put the three fieldsites in productive comparison and dialogue through ethnographic insights and analysis.