A Trip to Krabi amid a Global IT Outage
I received a very welcome visit this week from Jyoti and David, two friends from my evermore distant Oxford days. The two arrived on Thursday morning, and after eating lunch I showed them around a few places in the neighbourhood: Wat Chana Songkhram, Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, the Metal Castle, and Wat Suthat. I left them to explore the Grand Palace and Wat Pho the following morning, as there was scarcely any time to do them justice once we had eaten. Despite my best efforts, the highlight of the day had nothing to do with the things we saw but with the food we ate. We had dinner at the fancy Methavalai Sorndaeng restaurant by the Democracy Monument, where we turned up without a reservation and found a table despite its multiple Michelin reviews.
We left the centre on Friday afternoon by ordering a
Grab ride to Don Mueang Airport. The place was in utter mayhem. Crowds were
piling up by the check-in counters with little indication of which desk was
responsible for which flight, and all the airport staff were busy fielding
questions from anxious tourists. We initially joined the wrong queue, and only
after waiting for a good half an hour did a staff member tell us that we would
have to start over again by a different counter. While this was somewhat frustrating,
we saw that all the flights with our carrier were being delayed and figured
ours would be as well.
Perhaps an hour later, I checked my phone to find that
the issue was not restricted to our airline nor, indeed, Bangkok. A small
system update by a Windows partner company caused an entire global IT outage,
affecting air travel, TV broadcasters, hospitals, and banks. Once we finally
reached the check-in counter, the staff manually wrote down our names, seat
numbers, and other information on blank boarding pass forms, after which we
passed through security by showing these documents to other staff members
rather than using the scanners. Despite these difficulties, things could have gone
worse. The plane finally managed to take off with a delay of about three hours;
in some other countries, flights remained grounded for much longer.
Our weekend in Krabi passed peaceably. On the first
day, we walked along the beach, taking in the views of the light blue islands
across the bay. We briefly thought about booking a boat tour around some of
these islands, but the weather appeared too changeful to guarantee contentment:
it had rained heavily in the morning and would rain in the evening and night as
well. On the second day, David and I made a quick trip to a nearby nature
reserve. Neither the nearby brook nor the shade of the forest gave us respite
from the heat, though. Indeed, the air was more stagnant in the forest, making
us sweat profusely despite our best efforts not to exert ourselves too much.
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