“It's actually happened,” Oh thought, as if to shake himself out of the sense that it was all a bad dream. But now that one of those nightmare scenarios was playing out in reality, the feeling, for Oh, was both infuriating and surreal. They'd conducted drills as early as the summer of the previous year, simulating disasters like cyberattacks, fires, and earthquakes. The Pyeongchang organizing committee had prepared for this: Its cybersecurity advisory group had met 20 times since 2015. The Olympics' official app, including its digital ticketing function, was broken too when it reached out for data from backend servers, they suddenly had none to offer. Every RFID-based security gate leading into every Olympic building was down. Thousands of internet-linked TVs showing the ceremony around the stadium and in 12 other Olympic facilities had gone black. Oh's response had been annoyance: Even now, with the entire world watching, the company was still working out its bugs?Īs Oh made his way out of the press section toward the exit, reporters around him had already begun complaining that the Wi-Fi seemed to have suddenly stopped working. The contractor's glitches had been a long-term headache. The source of that problem was a contractor, an IT firm from which the Olympics were renting another hundred servers. Half an hour earlier, he'd gotten word about a nagging technical issue. That immense collection of machines seemed to be functioning perfectly-almost. He'd overseen the setup of an IT infrastructure for the games comprising more than 10,000 PCs, more than 20,000 mobile devices, 6,300 Wi-Fi routers, and 300 servers in two Seoul data centers.
For more than three years, the 47-year-old civil servant had been director of technology for the Pyeongchang Olympics organizing committee. Few felt that anticipation more intensely than Oh. The 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony was about to start.Īs the lights darkened around the roofless structure, anticipation buzzed through the 35,000-person crowd, the glow of their phone screens floating like fireflies around the stadium. He wore a gray and red official Olympics jacket that kept him warm despite the near-freezing weather, and his seat, behind the press section, had a clear view of the raised, circular stage a few hundred feet in front of him. Just before 8 pm on February 9, 2018, high in the northeastern mountains of South Korea, Sang-jin Oh was sitting on a plastic chair a few dozen rows up from the floor of Pyeongchang's vast, pentagonal Olympic Stadium.
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