Anthony Bosman, an academic at Andrews University in Michigan was trying to board his flight from Michigan to Florida when he realised he couldn’t download a mobile boarding pass to his smartphone. So he went to check in at the airport, in person, and watched in amazement as an airline employee looked up his name on a paper list and then wrote out his boarding pass – by hand. “It felt like a blast from the past,” he recalls.
“The ticket agent, I remember how she commented that her hand was tired from having to write so many of them.” His flight took off as planned. Multiple other passengers, including many in India, reported having the same experience that day.
The CrowdStrike bug also hit banks, telecoms firms, health services and online retailers. This week a senior executive at the firm committee and said he was "deeply sorry" for the chaos caused. For a brief moment in July, some organisations had to forget about their computer-based processes and do things the old-fashioned way.
If you look through articles about past cyber-attacks and IT failures on the BBC News website, you’ll find countless examples of organisations that have had to “go back to pen and paper” in the face of disruption. , , and have all experienced this. It sounds an almost pitiful predicament.
And yet, while it certainly isn’t desirable, some cyber-experts are now advising companies to plan for switching to paper-based processes in the event of IT failure. Rather than an ad hoc wor.
