ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA titled his most recent (September 2024 QST) Second Century editorial, Dewey Defeats Truman! a throwback reference to the exaggerated death of LoTW in the wake of the ransomware attack this summer. Dave apparently feels vindicated that there was no loss of data and who can blame him? Everyone at HQ could probably use a hug about now…

LoTW is dead and all the data is gone forever! Who doesn’t love a sensational, but completely false, headline? Did you read the posts from the systems gurus and armchair insiders? We did – in emails from panicked members. Alas, the real headline read more like, “LoTW is back on, and I uploaded my logs!” And, “The LoTW queue of 60,000 logs is now completely caught up in less than 4 days!”

I’m certain that made Dave feel better, but it warps reality a bit. An important service was offline for 50 days. Though we’ve all become accustomed to IT system downtime for maintenance and similar security events, this was a long time. Imagine your bank telling you they would be offline to deal with a security issue, and then being down two whole months. What if your power went off and didn’t come back on for 50 days? I mean there’s “downtime” and then there is downtime.

You know how when your flight has taken off and you’ve achieved cruising altitude and the pilot comes on the PA system to inform everyone of the current altitude and speed? He doesn’t do that for nothing. Heck, I don’t care, so long as they stay above the trees and the mountains I’m good. But there are nervous passengers who don’t enjoy flight. And hearing the steady voice from the cockpit assures those with white-knuckles that all is well with the plane.

ARRL members deserved that kind of reassurance during the 50 days of LoTW downtime. We didn’t get that. Instead we were fed a terse response every few weeks during the event. That wasn’t bad management, it was malfeasance. ARRL is particularly bad at this sort of transparency. In an age where we’ve come to expect rapid, online responses to these sorts of things, ARRL seems to still live in the print era where news only dribbles out once a month, in the next edition of QST magazine. We know (now) it was a ransomware attack that involved law-enforcement, but that’s no excuse for infrequent updates, even if a full explanation wasn’t permissible. Members only discovered it was a major ransomware attack from other IT security publications – not the ARRL web.

Somewhere back in our long ago the complaints seen by most members came in the form of tightly controlled ‘Letters to the Editor’ of QST magazine. In this century we’ve all become publishers of sorts, and now the arrows come from all directions and never seem to let up. The League (yes, I still call it that) has enough trouble and snarky comments on social media don’t help. But the vacuum of zero information will be filled with something. Proactive messaging could have improved this situation, but transparency and info sharing continues to be ARRL’s Achilles heel.

And while it’s wonderful that no data was lost and the system is back up and running, all systems still haven’t been recovered. Certain award services remain unavailable. An August 7th update, the first in nearly a month, said these are expected back online by August 20th.

Note ⁍  I’m an ARRL Life Member who uses LoTW exclusively for radio contact confirmation.