Our Internet is down; Too bad we aren’t using cloud services!

When I got to the office today everything was fine on this Tuesday morning.  Within 15 minutes my phone started ringing off the hook!  THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!!!  Call after call of users asking if the internet connection was down. Most of those early conversations began something like this, “Is there a problem with the internet because I can’t connect to Gmail/my banks website/Facebook?”  the caller would ask.

Yes.  If you can’t get to the internet there is a problem.  In this case the problem was our ISP (Internet Service Provider.)  They had an outage.  In total we were without internet access from about 8:00 a.m. till 2:45 p.m., six almost seven hours.   That’s a long time.

Our CAD Techs and Engineers were all able to work on their respective projects, but the managers had a difficult time communicating with clients and local municipalities.  The internet outage knocked out our email server.  It couldn’t communicate with the rest of the world so we weren’t receiving nor were we sending emails.  Since we also use a VOIP (Voice Over I.P.) phone system, our phones were down too.