System Failure.

The woes of the Pakistan Railways (PR) never seem to end. A few days back, the Minister for Railways Azam Khan Swati announced that the PR has suffered a huge loss of Rs1.2 trillion, and now another conundrum has befallen the institution. Its electronic system of e-ticketing and financial and human resources collapsed, leaving 60 online reservation offices disconnected from the main servers.

According to the PR administration, the online seat reservation system has been set up again by using the host server of the National Telecom Corporation. However, even with this backup for a reservation system, the severity of this crash should not be understated. Whether it was hacking or a glitch, the crash of its servers could result in major data loss-if it was a hack, then sensitive data could have been compromised. Either way, this means data on pensions, salaries and finances, tracing back to 2016, could be lost. In an already malfunctioning and inefficient system, this upheaval of...