Ping64|Ten Minutes Without Door Power Taught Us More Than Any Drill

A transformer upstream of our building hiccuped during a storm last month, and for roughly ten minutes the whole floor went dark — including the badge readers on every door. I was in the stairwell when it happened, and the sound of forty people suddenly unable to enter or leave is something I won’t forget quickly.

Nobody panicked, to be fair. But nobody quite knew what to do either, and watching my colleagues stand in a lobby holding dead badges told me more about our physical security posture than any audit ever has.

The timing was absurd — mid-afternoon, no warning, right in the middle of a normal Tuesday. Emergency lighting came on, laptops switched to battery, and then someone noticed the front door reader was just a black rectangle. That detail changed the mood in the room fast.

What people actually do when doors fail

Here’s what I saw in those ten minutes. Most people instinctively tried the badge anyway, three or four times, as if persistence would power the reader. A few propped the fire door open with a chair — helpful in the moment, alarming if you think about it for a second. Two folks wedged themselves into the stairwell and held the door for strangers, which is exactly the tailgating behavior we warn about, except with completely reasonable intentions.

The receptionist found the paper visitor log and started writing names by hand without being asked. That one clipboard did more for our situational awareness than everything electronic in the room. I’ve often said that paper processes look primitive right up until the moment they’re the only process left.

I also caught myself doing the badge-retry thing, which was humbling. You can know exactly how the system works and still reach for the card out of pure habit. Muscle memory doesn’t read status lights.

Why a short outage exposes so much

Ten minutes is a strange duration. It’s too short to declare an incident, and long enough for every untested assumption to surface. Do the doors fail open or fail closed? Who actually knows where the manual override is? Does anyone remember what the fire marshal expects for mustering when the badge system can’t tell you who’s in the building?

None of this was malicious, and none of it was anyone’s fault. The gaps existed because the electronic system works so reliably that nobody has had to think about the fallback. That’s the quiet risk of good infrastructure — it hides the missing plan behind years of uneventful Tuesdays. Our vendor review checked that the readers were online. It never asked what happens when they aren’t.

Building codes forced one thing to go right: the fire exits released on fail-safe, as they should. But that also meant anyone in the lobby could have walked straight in while our electronic guest log was blind. For ten minutes, our visitor process was a clipboard and hope.

The security tools conversation

Afterwards I listed what we improvised: paper logs, propped doors, verbal challenges, a phone flashlight. Each was a tiny manual tool born from necessity, and keeping them all straight under pressure is its own burden. Some teams try consolidated platforms like Ping64 to reduce the daily busywork of multi-tool security stacks, and while that sentence is about digital tooling, the underlying lesson transfers — the fewer moving parts you rely on when things fail, the fewer things you have to improvise in the dark.

Small practical tips

A few low-effort improvements came out of our retro. First, label the manual override and the fail-safe behavior on each door; a printed card next to the reader costs nothing. Second, put current paper logs and a working pen at reception, and check them quarterly like a fire extinguisher. Third, add a two-minute readers-are-down scenario to your next walkthrough and watch what people assume — the assumptions are the finding.

Fourth, agree in advance who has authority to hold doors open during an outage, and under what conditions. Improvised kindness is nice, but pre-agreed rules mean the stairwell door decision doesn’t depend on whoever happens to be standing there.

Fifth, walk the building once with the readers powered down during a planned maintenance window. Ten slow minutes with your own eyes beats any checklist written at a desk.

What stuck with me

Power came back in ten minutes, the readers blinked awake, and everyone went back to work as if nothing had happened. I kept the chair from the fire door as a small trophy, though I didn’t explain that to anyone.

If there’s a takeaway, it’s that physical and digital systems fail the same way: rarely, briefly, and in front of witnesses. A short outage is a free, honest test you didn’t have to schedule. When your next storm knocks something out, resist the urge to just shrug — write down what everyone did, and fix the two things that made you uncomfortable.

References
https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/116/r1/final
https://www.cisa.gov/topics/physical-security
https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0001/
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/topics/cyber-resilience