A ransomware incident in New Britain, Connecticut, in late January 2026 affected city network systems for more than 48 hours. Some departments reverted to manual processes. Emergency response and essential services continued through backup and manual continuity plans.
That last sentence is the reason this file exists, and it describes something the sector rarely gets to demonstrate.
A Continuity Plan That Has Never Been Used Is A Document
Almost every organisation of this size has business continuity documentation, usually written to satisfy an audit requirement and reviewed annually by someone updating the date.
The distinction between that and an actual capability shows up in the first hour: whether staff know where the paper forms are, whether anyone still knows the manual process, and whether the person authorised to declare the switch is reachable.
Manual Operation Is A Skill That Decays
This desk has now filed the same finding across three sectors: the Minnesota water utilities in 26-0727, the European airports in 26-0406, and a port that ran on clipboards for nine days.
In each case, the capability that limited the damage depended on staff who remembered how the work was done before automation. Nobody tracks that as a resilience metric, and every efficiency programme quietly reduces it.
Two Days Is A Good Outcome And A Warning
Forty-eight hours is short by the standards of municipal ransomware. It is also long enough that a city with no manual fallback would have had visible failures.
Graded medium: the incident and continuity response are consistently reported, and the intrusion route, actor and any data impact are not established.
Compiled from public reporting, listed below. No attribution has been established. The scope of any data access has not been disclosed. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.