Until it’s not

Reporter Editorial

Our publisher always says Thursday was named after Thor for a reason: it is always when the hammer hits.

This newspaper suffered technical difficulties on Thursday. It prevented most readers from getting local news until after 3 p.m.

If you have paid any attention at all to tech news in the last three years, you will have noticed a deluge of data breaches and hacks impacting countless industries. You may also have noticed an abundance of follow-up stories where a company had a hack or breach and never told anyone about it until weeks or months later, usually when some insider spoke to media about how customers were put at risk.

None of our customers were put at risk, though they were inconvenienced.

This newspaper does not keep personal or financial data online. Our publisher even wrote a Rick-rolling column about why you need to keep your data out of the cloud (which you can enjoy at this link).

Sometime in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, several digital things changed.

Email filters became exceptionally aggressive and in many cases miscellaneous. You have surely seen many emails that were legitimate going into your spam folder, while countless spam emails go straight to your inbox.

The instances of data breaches exploded across the world.

Every piece of software is now in a constant state of update, as no one is willing or able to write clean, efficient code, then test it thoroughly, then release it as a final product.

All of which is to say, the modern tech landscape is a horrible place and yesterday that affected all our readers.

We would say we are sorry, but we didn’t do anything different. Someone at the hosting company we use started a data migration in the middle of the night. They clearly screwed that up and were unable to fix it until late the following afternoon.

As our publisher’s father, Stanley (like the power drill) Clampitt, said in 1989, “Technology is great … until it’s not.”

Welcome to the era of “until it’s not.”