> But, the fire service was hit fairly hard. The reporting system is also
> used for turnouts, and was down, so the comm centers had to page
> everyone out manually.

[snipped lots of interesting stuff about how various emergency services handled the drop back to manual processes]

Anyone else pretty pleased and impressed with how well the people and organisations involved dealt with a failure in the automated systems? Personally it makes me a bit happier to realise that some genuinely critical services have pretty solid backup processes that by all accounts so far were followed and performed satisfactorily.

I think everyone with a reliance on technology for their business / personal life needs to take a lesson from this.

If your reliance on technology is _THAT_ important, you WILL have suitable backup systems in place. And I don't mean having 2 x ADSL connections either! :-)

Cheers - N