NORFOLK, Va. — Friday's global IT outages impacted TV stations across the country, including us here at 13News Now.
Just like many businesses and households, 13News Now depends greatly on technology to bring you the news. So what do we do when faced with an outage like the one we saw on Friday?
Eugene Daniel gave us a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to stay on the air when something like this happens.
Daniel explains that our team of producers, directors, and engineers worked overnight to assemble a show without our normal tools, ensuring viewers still got the information they needed.
He says believe it or not, but we frequently train for these situations.
“We’re constantly looking for new ways to have systems that can back up our existing systems and still be safe,” says Director of Technology Keith O'Malley.
Adding, “We have systems in place that are completely separate from the rest of the world. So we bring those systems into play and allow us to produce a newscast and have weather and have all the information that viewers are expecting from us without the normal computer connections that the world has.”
Daniel says we prepare for the unexpected ahead of time, "because we don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be a computer event today. It could be a hurricane next week.”
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