What happens when the internet goes out at your work?

I work from home, so it is a little different. If my internet goes out, fixing that becomes my immediate task. If it ends up being some sort of area outage or something out of my hands, I do generally have some work I can do offline, or I can maybe take lunch early or shift my schedule around until it comes back.

My entire team gets pulled out of whatever else we're troubleshooting to take a look at switches, routers, and firewalls to see what broke. Those of us (un)lucky enough to live within driving range of the office come in to check for hardware issues while the rest check what logs they can get to.

Granted, I work in IT so my and my team's reaction is unique in the company, so IDK what the rest of the company does.

When I was working at a software engineer at a FAANG the answer was usually to wait an hour or so to see if it was going to come back and if not then just leave. This applied to both internet and power as it was effectively impossible to get any work done without it. In theory one could say "just write code offline", but I usually used remote development environments so no internet meant losing my development environments.

I also used to work in game development. There no internet did just mean to write code offline and generally posed little issue to getting work done, at least as long as the outage didn't last more than the day.

WFH as well; I use my mobile hotspot instead. If that doesn't work either, then I just don't work.

I work from home, but I also work for the ISP... So that would be an interesting day for me haha.

We need to switch to paper charting and everything becomes a little bit more painful to do.

Nearly all of our workflows are Internet-dependent; no service means no access to e-mail, documents, VOIP phones, customer remote connections, cloud hosts, online meetings, ticketing systems, GitHub, Slack, image and CAD files... we can't even ship equipment. There are a few hosts we can access via local Ethernet for testing, but that's not enough to stay busy all day. I have OneDrive sync to my laptop for active project documents that I need for reference - that's not where I spend the majority of my time.

Well, this past week, Spectrum (the major ISP for the parts of the region that don't have access to downtown fiber) and Verizon had crappy service, so I was losing connections at both work and home. Periods of ~25 -100% packet loss throughout the day...

Usually, if Internet at work or home is down, I can switch locations and/or hotspot on Verizon. Verizon service works well enough to access cloud resources and customer sites, though I'm not going to be moving around 1 GB software and configuration packages. If the office service is down, the only thing I can't reach under normal circumstances is the lab bench system, which is on an isolated network with its own service, but the same ISP as the rest of the office. However, it seems that a wide area cable Internet outage is more than Verizon can handle, and everything slowed to a crawl.

Replacing the Spectrum router took care of my home Internet issues very nicely, with an unexpected bump up to 500 Mb service. The office service issues remain intermittent; there's a lot of excavation activity in the area to expand fiber coverage so hopefully we'll have more reliable service soon.

Well, it's happened more often than I'd like lately. As a teacher, I can't just... Not do the work. We have hard copy resources we can use but everything is slower and it destroys our pacing for the day. I'm more old school and tend not to want kids on their chrome books often anyways, so none of that is affected for me.

What it really means is I just spend more time juggling giant flip books or something and writing a whole lot more on the white board.

I work in video editing and only work on locally stored files as much as possible, so I just get annoyed that I can’t quickly do an internet search for which menu they moved the thing I’m trying to do to in the latest version of Premiere.

I don't think I've ever had the internet go out while at work. I have, however, had the power go out a number of times of the years. Most recently, it was because a goose flew into some power cables across the road (sad story, it was the male of a pair that have been hatching their eggs on our patio upstairs for years).

Anyway, when the power goes out I can usually continue some of my work, preparing shipments and packing boxes, but once that's done I'll generally consider myself to have hit a wall. If we were absolutely desperate, I could start filling paper waybills in by hand, but frankly I don't think anyone else remembers that we have those and I'd really rather not develop a hand cramp just for the power to come back on 15 seconds after I finish writing one out so I just don't mention them to anybody.