And then there are the perhaps easier to identify situations where there is not a fallback. Like this morning where I am, the network that hooks up the spread-out office of the local commuter train (where my wife works) is via a respected regional ISP. But something crashed and the admin computers won’t talk to the other buildings or the outside world. Ok, that happens a lot. But it looks like they use that same ISP for their smart card ticketing system on the trains and thus nobody can pay since the trains don’t issue paper tickets and don’t take cash. In this case the train doors open anyway. But the could just as well not open.
The point being that a critical function was outsourced to a private business and to save money no immediate fallback was set up, such as you would see in a backup generator that automatically kicks on when the power goes down (hospitals and even our little rural radio station studio has that). So, does a big civic plan budget include fallbacks for when such outages inevitably occur? They had better…
I guess in the old days they had stuck drawbridges…maybe they still do.