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The boss of networking giant Cisco has said the shortage of computer chips is set to last for most of this year.

Many firms have seen production delayed because of a lack of semiconductors, triggered by the Covid pandemic and exacerbated by other factors.

Cisco chief Chuck Robbins told the BBC: “We think we’ve got another six months to get through the short term.

“The providers are building out more capacity. And that’ll get better and better over the next 12 to 18 months.”

That expansion of capacity will be crucial as advances in technology – including 5G, cloud computing, the internet of things and artificial intelligence – drive a big increase in demand.

Mr Robbins is the latest tech boss to weigh in on the debate – and with 85% of internet traffic using Cisco’s systems, his opinion matters.

“Right now, it is a big problem,” he says, “because semiconductors go in virtually everything.”

The seemingly insatiable demand is why major US manufacturer Intel announced a $20bn (£14.5bn) plan to significantly expand production, including two new plants in Arizona.

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According to Dan Ives, a tech analyst at investment firm Wedbush Securities, current “demand is probably 25% higher than anyone would have expected”.

Even though the shortage “is going to be an issue for the next three to six months”, technology share prices are doing well because investors are focused on the growing long-term demand for their products.

US President Joe Biden also sees this as a long-term issue and used a White House summit with business leaders this month to urge them to make the country a world leader in computer chips. Amid the trade and technology war with China, the White House says it is “a top and immediate priority”.

The US-based Semiconductor Industry Association says 75% of global manufacturing capacity is in East Asia. Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung are the dominant players.

European politicians also want more chips made locally, a view partly driven by concerns over China’s desire to achieve reunification with Taiwan. Meanwhile, China has seen a huge growth in domestic demand for chips to power new technology, but has only a small share of global manufacturing capacity.

Mr Robbins says: “I think that it doesn’t necessarily matter where they’re made, as long as you have multiple sources.”

However, Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger told the BBC it was not “palatable” to have so many chips made in Asia.

TSMC appears intent on holding on to its position as the world’s biggest contract manufacturer and is spending $100bn to expand capacity over the next three years.

This week its founder, Morris Chang, called on the Taiwanese government to “keep hold of it tightly”, arguing it is better positioned to make chips than the US or China, despite their big government subsidies.

The chip shortage was heightened by the coronavirus pandemic. At first, many companies cut their orders for chips, thinking demand would fall, which led suppliers to reduce capacity. However, demand for consumer electronics rose during the pandemic.

The problems have been worsened by a string of other factors, including a fire at a semiconductor factory and weather issues.

This, combined with a “generational technological change has created an unprecedented situation for the industry”, according to Paul Triolo, who leads the geo-technology practice at consultancy Eurasia Group.

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He thinks it doesn’t matter where chips are made as long as there is a diversity of supply. However, the shortages are likely “to persist for some time” and longer-term solutions are needed to address the concentration of manufacturing of semiconductors, which is a “problem that predates the shortage”.

That is why Mr Robbins says: “What we don’t want is to have consolidation where any of the risks that we may face could, frankly, result in the situation we’re seeing today, whether it’s weather-related disaster risks, whether it’s single point of failure risk, whether its geopolitical risks, whatever those are. We just need more options, I think, for where semiconductors are built.”

Cisco recently completed the $4.5bn acquisition of Acacia Communications, which, among other things, designs computer chips. Mr Robbins ruled out Cisco using it as an opportunity to start making its own chips.

“We’re not a semiconductor fab company, so it’s not a core competency for us to do that. So we think that companies that play in this space are much better equipped, we’re working very closely with them.”

The huge cost of chip manufacturing facilities means they operate at near full capacity and so it will take time to meet the increased demand.

The size of that demand “is not clear”, according to Mr Triolo. He says that, like other major technology vendors, “Cisco’s equipment relies heavily on reliable supply chains for a range of semiconductors.”

The shortages, he says, have been “exacerbated by companies over ordering components to build up inventory, afraid of being caught short again”.

You can watch Chuck Robbins’ full interview on “Talking Business with Aaron Heslehurst” this weekend on BBC World News at Saturday 2330 GMT, Sunday 0530 and 1630 GMT, Monday 0630 GMT and 1030 GMT and Tuesday at 1230 GMT.

It is no secret that technology has become increasingly present in our lives, especially over the past year.

We use our devices to stay in touch with friends and family, to educate and entertain our children and, for many, to work from home.

But endless virtual interactions have resulted in so-called Zoom Fatigue, according to scientists at Stanford University.

To prevent digital burnout, tech firms are now trying to design technological solutions to encourage productivity and creativity and to allow you to spend less time staring at a screen.

Take breaks
Microsoft has introduced a new tool on Outlook that encourages people to take shorter meetings with plenty of breaks.

The settings schedule meetings five minutes after the hour – to provide a natural break between calls.

The tool was created in response to Microsoft’s own research, which found that back-to-back virtual meetings can make people stressed and distracted.

Researchers conducted brain scans of 14 people during four half-hour back-to-back meetings – once without breaks, and once with 10-minute breaks in-between each meeting.

The analysis said no breaks led to a spike in stress levels, especially when switching between calls.

“Taking a physical break from screens is also essential, as this can improve our ability to focus,” Nick Hedderman, modern work lead at Microsoft UK, told the BBC.

He suggests that leaders could create a “positive remote culture” by:

shortening meetings to between 20 and 40 minutes
conducting “team check-ins” that aren’t related to work
scheduling voice-only walking meetings “to change the scenery and improve physical wellbeing”
Clear boundaries
“If we are mindful of our behaviour and establish clear boundaries and schedules, we can choose to have technology work for us instead of against us,” says Naz Beheshti, former executive assistant to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

In her new book, Pause. Breathe. Choose: Become the CEO of Your Well-Being, she stresses the importance of being bored, a lesson she learned from Mr Jobs to encourage creativity.

“The next time you have a gap of time in your day, refrain from filling it,” her book says. “Resist picking up your phone or other electronic devices, which could temporarily entertain you with something diverting like your never-ending social media feed.”

There are a mounting number of scientific studies which have shown that phones and notifications have a detrimental effect on productivity and attention.

Research from the University of California Irvine found it took 23 minutes to return to a single task after a notification. And people managed to focus their attention on computers for an average of only 47 seconds, before turning to another screen such as a phone.

Notifications can take time to recover from, lead to errors and can cause stress, the research suggests.

Daily limits
Apple and Google have both tried to empower smartphone users, with Apple’s Screen Time feature and Android’s Digital Wellbeing tool.

A user’s device will brief them on how much time is spent on each app, and how many notifications they have received.

You can set daily limits and timeframes and customise notifications.

And Google is adding a new feature that will send an alert telling you to look up from your phone when walking.

Without notifications, even the presence of a phone can reduce your ability to concentrate, according to one study from the University of Chicago.

Digital detox
For those without the willpower to disable notifications, there are tech hardware solutions.

The Light Phone is a simple mobile phone, which aims to eliminate distractions caused by smartphones.

It has very basic capabilities: calls, texts (and group messaging), alarm and mobile hotspot.

You can also add a calculator, simple music player and podcasting tool.

But the phone “will never have social media, internet browsing, email, news, or ads”, the company promises.

There has been a steep increase in orders of the Light Phone over the pandemic, as people struggle to switch off at home.

“The problem is still there, if anything it’s worse because we are locked down,” co-founder Kaiwei Tang explains.

Only 50% of Light Phone owners use it as their primary phone, many switch to it at the weekend, on holiday or in the evenings, when they want a break, Mr Tang adds.

And for drafting documents, or editing them, reMarkable offers a technology solution… to the notebook.

It looks like a tablet, but feels like writing on paper. The technology can also convert your handwriting into a text file to send over email.

But as it is designed to “take you into production mode”, you can’t browse the internet, receive emails or even check the time on the tablet.

“It isn’t just a device, it is a counter-movement against all of that,” says chief executive Magnus Wanberg.

He says it is “hypocritical” of big tech companies to put the responsibility of limiting screen time on the users, when devices and algorithms are designed to be addictive.

“Focus is the scarcest commodity now that we have,” he adds.

Deep work
There is a growing understanding of the importance of being left uninterrupted while doing focused “deep work”, says Prof Duncan Brumby, of University College London.

“We know that periods of focused deep work are short-lived and hard to carve out.

“These periods should therefore be used wisely, and notifications disabled during these times.”

But although this may be more productive, such working patterns may not be suitable for everyone.

“You are at the mercy of your boss” if you don’t respond to calls or emails for long periods of time, says Bruce Daisley, former Twitter vice-president, now author writing about workplace culture.

“Pretty much the whole of modern working is suboptimal for concentration,” he adds.

“We’re at breaking point with screen time.”

The West is faced with a “moment of reckoning” when it comes to technology and security, the head of intelligence agency GCHQ has told the BBC.

Jeremy Fleming said there was a risk that key technologies on which we rely will no longer be shaped by the West.

“We have to keep evolving our approach if we’re going to keep up,” he said of the growing challenge from China.

So-called smart cities, which will collect large amounts of data, are just one example, he added.

“The risk is that the technology is implemented in a way in which we can’t assure its security,” he warned.

The UK is a “big beast” when it comes to technology but “we can’t take that for granted”, the GCHQ director warned, saying this was a moment when we had to decide if we were going to continue to evolve and compete with our adversaries.

Mr Fleming was speaking ahead of giving this year’s Vincent Briscoe Annual Security Lecture at Imperial College, and in the wake of the Integrated Review, which placed science and technology at the centre of future security and defence policy.

Lessons from 5G
The challenge from China is uppermost in the minds of intelligence chiefs across Western countries, particularly when it comes to technology.

“The risk, as I see it today, is that we lose control of the standards that shape our technology environment,” he told the BBC.

“The things that make sure that our liberal Western democratic views are baked into our technology.”

Mr Fleming said there were lessons to be learnt from the debate over the role of Chinese company Huawei in building a new 5G telecoms system. It was initially given a role in the UK, before being excluded following US sanctions.

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But there were concerns that there were few other companies actually able to supply the latest technology.

“The conversation about 5G was really lost a decade ago, when Western nations decided that they weren’t going to invest in the underpinning infrastructures… and the result was we just didn’t have the choices,” he said.

The imperative was to make sure in the future the UK took the kind of long-range decisions need to ensure it has choice – so there would not be the same concerns over dependency, he said.

Smart city fears
That need to look forward prompted a focus on smart cities.

These involve a vast number of sensors and cameras built into a city’s infrastructure – controlling everything from traffic to utilities such as water and power.

But it also means vast amounts of data will be collected about people’s movement and activity.

Done in the right way, the GCHQ chief argues this presents a “fantastic opportunity” to increase efficiency and improve services.

But he warned it also carries risks around privacy and anonymity.

“If we don’t control the technology, if we don’t understand the security required to implement those effectively, then we’ll end up with an environment or technology ecosystem where the data is not only used to navigate, but it could be used to track us”.

China is a leading supplier of smart city technology, with councils in the UK already purchasing cameras from its companies.

Mr Fleming said it was vital to ensure all the technologies were not from one place and to understand how data was being processed.

There were only a relatively small number of areas where the UK would need to completely control a technology, he said, and more broadly working with allies would be essential to shape international standards and to defend itself in cyberspace.

At home, the UK has to invest in skills and innovation.

The UK should not be “fatalistic”, he said, and had a “very strong track record” of meeting technology challenges.

The Met Office is working with Microsoft to build a weather forecasting supercomputer in the UK.

They say it will provide more accurate weather forecasting and a better understanding of climate change.

The UK government said in February 2020 it would invest £1.2bn in the project.

It is expected to be one of the top 25 supercomputers in the world when it is up and running in the summer of 2022. Microsoft plans to update it over the next decade as computing improves.

“This partnership is an impressive public investment in the basic and applied sciences of weather and climate,” said Morgan O’Neill, assistant professor at Stanford University.

“Such a major investment in a state-of-the-art weather and climate prediction system by the UK is great news globally, and I look forward to the scientific advances that will follow.”

The Met Office said the technology would increase their understanding of the weather – and will allow people to better plan activities, prepare for inclement weather and get a better understanding of climate change.

The supercomputer will be able to:

provide more detailed weather models
run more potential weather scenarios
improve localised forecasts
better predict severe weather”Working together we will provide the highest quality weather and climate datasets and ever more accurate forecasts that enable decisions to allow people to stay safe and thrive,” said Penny Endersby, Chief Executive of the Met Office.

Microsoft UK Chief Executive Clare Barclay said the supercomputer would help the UK remain at the forefront of climate science.

Supercomputing
The exact location for the new computer was not revealed; however, the Met Office said it would be in the south of the UK. It will use Microsoft Azure and integrate Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray supercomputers.

It will run on 100% renewable energy and will have more than 1.5 million processor cores and more than 60 petaflops – or 60 quadrillion (60,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

That will, in theory, allow it to handle more data, more rapidly, and run it through simulations of the atmosphere more accurately.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children’s commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children’s data.

The claim is being filed on behalf of of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app.

If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds.

TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

‘Sinister’
Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children’s personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information.

In response, the video-sharing app said: “Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action.”

TikTok has more than 800 million users worldwide and parent firm ByteDance made billions in profits last year, with the vast majority of that coming via advertising revenue.

The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out.

Ms Longfield told the BBC she was focusing on TikTok because, while all social media platforms collected information, TikTok had “excessive” data collection policies.

“TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year. However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister.”

She alleges the firm is “a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network” which has “deliberately and successfully deceived parents”.

She added that those parents have a “right to know” what private information is being collected via TikTok’s “shadowy data collection practices”.

The case is being represented by law firm Scott and Scott. Partner Tom Southwell said he believed the information collected by TikTok represents “a severe breach of UK and EU data protection law”.

“TikTok and ByteDance’s advertising revenue is built on the personal information of its users, including children. Profiting from this information without fulfilling its legal obligations, and its moral duty to protect children online, is unacceptable.”

Age verification
The case is not without precedent.

In 2019, the Chinese firm was given a record $5.7m fine by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for mishandling children’s data.

The firm has been fined in South Korea over how it collects children’s data, and in the UK, it has been investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

That action revolved around Musical.ly, which was incorporated into TikTok, knowingly hosting content published by users under the age of 13.

TikTok was ordered to delete the data and set up an age verification system.

According to Ofcom, 44% of eight to 12-year-olds in the UK use TikTok, despite its policies forbidding under-13s on the platform.

Class action
Similar legal action against TikTok was brought by an anonymous 12-year-old girl last year, supported by Ms Longfield.

At the time, Ms Longfield said she was waiting to see the result of another case before proceeding with suing TikTok.

The case in question was brought by Which? director Richard Lloyd on behalf of four million iPhone users who, he alleges, were illegally tracked by Google.

Despite being launched in 2017, the case has still not had the go-ahead and is due to be heard by the Supreme Court soon.

“It could be difficult for similar cases to succeed if the Supreme Court dismisses Mr Lloyd’s ability to bring his claim,” said Richard Leedham, partner at law firm Mishcon de Reya.

The UK government is to examine the sale of computer chip designer Arm Holdings to a US company on national security grounds.

Japan’s SoftBank intended to sell the UK tech company to Nvidia for about $40bn (£29.5bn).

But Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said he wanted the UK’s competition watchdog to assess its implications.

“Following careful consideration of the proposed takeover, I have today issued an intervention notice,” he said.

“As a next step and to help me gather the relevant information, the UK’s independent competition authority will now prepare a report on the implications of the transaction, which will help inform any further decisions.”

Nvidia takeover of chip designer Arm investigated
UK tech firm ARM sold to America’s Nvidia for $40bn
Arm’s technology is at the heart of most smartphones and smart devices worldwide.

But there were concerns when the Cambridge-based designer – which licenses its tech to the likes of Apple, Samsung and Huawei – accepted the offer from Nvidia, a US graphics chip specialist.

In January, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced it was looking into the deal amid worries it could lead Arm to withdraw, raise prices or reduce the quality of its services to Nvidia’s rivals.

Mr Dowden has now ordered it to begin a “phase one” investigation, which will decide whether a full “phase two” investigation is needed that could lead to the deal being blocked.

A spokesperson for Nvidia said: “We do not believe that this transaction poses any material national security issues.

“We will continue to work closely with the British authorities, as we have done since the announcement of this deal.”

‘Premier computing company’
Last year, more than 2,000 business leaders signed an open letter calling on the prime minister to stop the merger, saying UK jobs and influence could be lost.

Nvidia has promised to keep Arm based in the UK, to hire more staff, and to retain its brand.

It said that the deal would create “the premier computing company for the age of artificial intelligence”.

Nvidia could face barriers from other regulators around the world.

China, in particular, has already made clear that it is not happy about a deal which gives so much power to an American giant at a time when the US has sought to deny Chinese firms access to chip technology.

The CMA will have until 30 July to submit its findings to the digital secretary.

When Arm was sold to Japan’s SoftBank just after the 2016 EU referendum, the government celebrated the deal as a vote of confidence in the UK. Some had misgivings about what they saw as the jewel in the crown of 21st Century British technology falling into foreign hands, but guarantees that research and development would be strengthened in Cambridge seemed to allay ministers’ concerns.

Then when SoftBank sold Arm on to the American chip giant Nvidia last year, there were even louder complaints from the likes of Hermann Hauser who had been instrumental in the founding of the company more than 30 years ago. But it seemed there was even less likelihood of an intervention – what business of the Competition and Markets Authority was a deal between a Japanese and an American company?

But much has changed since 2016. Arm being bought by Nvidia is, it appears, a national security concern now in a way that the Softbank deal was not. Why? Well the vital importance of the semiconductor industry has become clear in recent months, with chips at the centre of a US-China trade war and chip shortages halting production at car plants.

There has also been a major shift in the UK’s attitude towards industrial policy. After three decades of a laissez-faire approach from both Conservative and Labour governments there’s a new willingness to intervene – witness the move to spend taxpayers’ money on a controlling stake in the failing satellite business OneWeb.

With other governments and regulators around the world not convinced that Nvidia owning Arm will be good for competition in the chip industry, it is far from certain that this deal will go through.

Charles Geschke, the co-founder of the software company Adobe who helped develop the Portable Document Format, or PDF, has died at the age of 81.

Geschke set up Adobe in 1982, giving the world the ubiquitous PDF software, among many other audio-visual innovations.

He made headlines 10 years later when he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom before being released unhurt after a four-day ordeal.

Geschke died in California on Friday.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Geschke, widely known as Chuck, “sparked the desktop publishing revolution”.

“This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades,” he wrote in an email to the company’s employees.

“As co-founders of Adobe, Chuck and John Warnock developed ground-breaking software that has revolutionized how people create and communicate,” he said.

Geschke and Warnock were responsible for transformative software inventions, including PDF, Acrobat, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and Photoshop, Mr Narayen said.

In 1992, Geschke was kidnapped in an incident that made national headlines.

He was held at gunpoint in his office and taken to Hollister, California, for four days.

Geschke was freed after a suspect, found with $650,000 (£470,000) in ransom money, took police to the location where he was being held, Associated Press reported.

In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the National Medal of Technology.

“He was really a humble, humble man – I can say that, as his wife,” Nan Geschke told Mercury News. “He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that.”

Online grocery retailer Ocado has unveiled a major push into autonomous driving technology.

It has teamed up with another British company, Oxbotica, to build self-driving vehicles for itself and others who use its platform.

That could include automatic forklift trucks at warehouses, self-driving delivery vans, or even “kerb to kitchen” robots for the final leg.

As part of the deal, Ocado has bought a £10m stake in Oxbotica.

Together, they say they plan to build hardware and software for autonomous vehicles.

“We want the entire end to end operation, ultimately, to be autonomous – from the receipt of stock to the warehouse all the way through to the customer’s door,” said Alex Harvey, Ocado’s head of advanced technology.

“From a customer’s perspective you open your door and outside you will see an autonomous van or another autonomous vehicle pull up outside your house, and most likely an autonomous robot will get out of that autonomous vehicle, will collect your groceries, and hand them to you at the doorstep.”

In recent years, Ocado has tried to project itself as a technology platform to be used by global retailers, rather than just an online grocery store.

It has developed robots which now pick and pack groceries at its state-of-the-art fulfilment centres, and this week, America’s Kroger supermarket chain unveiled its first warehouse using the Ocado technology.

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Kroger’s delivery vans also use software developed by Ocado to plot the most efficient routes.

The new partnership with Oxbotica will aim to take this idea further.

Driverless deliveries?
Oxbotica builds autonomous driving software for a range of global clients. The company was founded in 2014 by two Oxford professors – Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner – whose university research focused on self-driving cars.

The startup company has just raised new funding from investors in the UK, US and China. Ocado’s £10m stake is part of that funding round, and will give it a seat on Oxbotica’s board.

In its announcement, Ocado tempered expectations and said that getting permission from regulators to operate autonomous vehicles on public roads – allowing driverless deliveries to customers’ homes – may take some time.

But it said that “last-mile” deliveries to customers’ homes are a significant part of an online retailer’s costs, with labour accounting for half of that – so autonomous vans could produce big savings.

In the short term, it sees vehicles operating in restricted areas such as its own warehouses, with the first prototypes coming within two years.

A Canadian politician has apologised after appearing naked in a video call with colleagues.

“This was an unfortunate error,” William Amos, who represents the Quebec district of Pontiac, said in a statement on Wednesday.

“My video was accidentally turned on as I was changing into my work clothes after going for a jog,” he said.

A screenshot of the incident posted on social media shows Mr Amos holding a mobile phone over his private parts.

The liberal member of parliament was captured standing behind a chair near a desk between the Quebec and Canadian flags.

Mr Amos said he was “embarrassed” by the incident, which he described as an “honest mistake” that “won’t happen again”.

“I sincerely apologise to my colleagues in the House of Commons for this unintentional distraction,” he said in his statement, later tweeting a similar apology.

A member of Canada’s Bloc Québécois party, Claude DeBellefeuille, said after the conference call that it might be “necessary to remind the members, especially the male ones, that a tie and jacket are obligatory”.

“We have seen that the member is in great physical shape, but I think members should be reminded to be careful and control the camera,” she said in French, according to CTV News.

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Within hours of Iran proudly announcing the launch of its latest centrifuges, a power blackout damaged some of the precious machines at its site in Natanz.

Iran has described this as an act of “terrorism” and pointed the finger at Israel. But there is still mystery over the cause.

In Israel, some reports have suggested a cyber-attack might have been responsible but Iran has talked of “infiltrators” amid reports of an explosion linked to the power generator.

One thing reports seem to agree on is that an “incident” affected the power distribution network at Natanz, leading to a blackout until emergency power systems kicked in.

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A blackout may not sound that serious, but it can be at an enrichment plant. Centrifuges are slender machines linked up in what are called cascades which enrich uranium gas by spinning it at incredibly high speeds using rotors. The stress on the advanced materials involved is intense and the process is technically immensely challenging.

A small problem can send a centrifuge spinning out of control, with parts smashing into each other and damaging a whole cascade.

Ensuring the power supply reaching a centrifuge is perfectly balanced is vital. Which means sabotage of that supply can be catastrophic.

The question is: what caused it – a cyber-attack or a physical act of sabotage, like a bomb?

The speculation of cyber-attack comes because Natanz is Ground Zero for cyber-war – the place where the world’s first real cyber-attack took place a decade ago.

Most events called cyber-attacks are not really attacks in the physical sense – they are thefts of data. But Stuxnet – the name given to the incident that targeted Iran’s nuclear programme over a decade ago – is not just one of the few exceptions but arguably also the first demonstration of what such a cyber-attack looks like.

In that case, computer codes caused real-word damage by interfering with the centrifuge controllers to spin them out of control (and even relaying false messages back to those monitoring them so they would not worry until it was too late). The result was what sounded like a slow-motion explosion as centrifuges crashed into each other. It was an incredibly sophisticated and targeted operation, run jointly by the US and Israel and developed over a period of years.

But that does not mean that a cyber-attack has to be responsible this time. Iran invested heavily in cyber-defence and offense after Stuxnet making such an attack much harder and doing more to protect its systems, including the power supply.

Stuxnet showed the separation between online and physical attacks could be blurry – a cyber incident could cause real-world damage. But it also worked the other way – cyber-attacks sometimes required real-world help. Some of the versions of Stuxnet are believed to have required a person to physically insert a USB into a machine in order to get access to the Iranian system. And a physical act of sabotage might be accompanied by a cyber-intrusion to black out the power or alarm systems.

And there is also precedent for some kind of physical sabotage.

Last summer, a previously unknown group calling itself the Homeland Tigers said it was behind a blast which affected a building above ground at Natanz (most of the sensitive work is underground). Statements were sent to the BBC, as well as others, claiming the group were disaffected Iranians and promising more attacks would come. Many at the time assumed Israel was involved in some way, not least because the country has also been linked to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.

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In the immediate aftermath of an incident, reports are often conflicting and hazy. There can also deliberate disinformation – sometimes a country like Israel might prefer it to appear that a cyber-incident was involved to protect anyone who infiltrated the site. And Iran itself may either not know, or want to reveal all it knows.

The details are likely to become clearer in the coming days, with more reports pointing towards an explosion at the power supply rather than simply a cyber-incident. But whatever the cause, previous incidents of either online or physical sabotage have only led to temporary setbacks for the Iranian nuclear programme. And this time Iran has again insisted it will push forwards with its work at Natanz.