Pen and paper to the rescue.
The photo above illustrates what life has been like at Sea-Tac Airport this week in the aftermath of a suspected cyberattack on the Port of Seattle that sparked an outage Saturday and continued through Wednesday.
The outage impacted many digital displays throughout Sea-Tac Airport, including information about flight times and where arriving passengers can find their luggage.
Port staff have resorted to manual methods, such as writing flight numbers and carousel locations on large sheets of paper, as you can see above.
The two people in the photo — Vy Donnelly, senior manager of aviation finance and budget, and Eileen Francisco, director of aviation project management — don’t typically work at the airport everyday.
But since Port staff have been locked out of their emails due to the cyberattack, many are helping out at the airport this week, answering questions for passengers and guiding them to the right place in absence of digital displays.
The Port is providing updates about the outage at this webpage. As of Wednesday, displays were still out and some baggage services were still impacted.
The outage is not impacting security screenings at Sea-Tac Airport and there are only a handful of flight cancellations.
Airport officials suggest sticking to carry on, if you can. If you have to check luggage, try to arrive early — especially if you’re flying Frontier, Spirit, Sun Country, JetBlue, and international airlines. Luggage services for those airlines are impacted because they use “common use” check-in space that is operated by Sea-Tac Airport.
Officials haven’t talked about the severity of the incident, or when they expect things to be back and running. The Port is working with the FBI and other partners on the investigation.
Related coverage:
- Cyberattack at Port of Seattle is the latest example of increasing threats to critical infrastructure
- Port of Seattle outage continues two days after suspected cyberattack by ‘nefarious characters’
- Port of Seattle investigating ‘unauthorized activity’ that led to cyberattack; no timeline for outage fix