23
votes
What happens when the internet goes out at your work?
Can you pivot to other tasks, or are you dead in the water? What about others? Your team/department? Tell us what its like for those minutes/hours.
How often does the internet drop for you (if at all)?
If you don't ever lose internet at work (lucky you!), answer hypothetically about what would happen.
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.
That's my situation as well. I've worked from my laptop on battery using mobile hotspot when my neighborhood has had power outages, for example. If it's on my employers end, then theoretically I could still try to do some offline code reading, architectural planning, or coding. In practice, yeah, break time.
Same deal if I really cant lose a day of work. If its slow then I just stop working. Ive also gone to a coffee shop to work before, but these days I just cant lose my dual monitors haha
same although usually I'm just on my phone and don't bother hotspotting
if it's late (I work flexible hours) sometimes I cut my losses and go to bed early
I work from home, but I also work for the ISP... So that would be an interesting day for me haha.
Do you get free internet working for them?
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.
We need to switch to paper charting and everything becomes a little bit more painful to do.
"a little bit"
Fuck
Unscheduled
Downtime
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.
So, I have a few different answers here. For context, I'm a software engineer, so I'm generally working pretty closely (but not at the IT/ops level) with the relevant equipment.
WFH
Currently, like several others here, I work from home; so if the Internet goes out "at work", it's gone out at my house and fixing it becomes my top priority. Even if I could work offline, nobody else will fix it, and I'd be fixing it as soon as I signed off for the day regardless. Until recently, I was with "horrible ISP monopoly du jour" (or "HIMDJ" as I'm going to call them going forward) and this process generally consisted of:
I'm now with a local fiber ISP, and have had zero outages of note so far (a better record than HIMDJ despite only a few months of service). I suppose when I do have one, the process will be similar. When I'm unable to resolve the issue, I have a "5G modem" (an old cell phone) which I can tether to my router via USB to connection share, which works great as long as you don't have anything that automatically snarfs a ton of bandwidth if it decides all wifi is unmetered.
(As I've mentioned a few times in previous comments, it's possible to set up automatic uplink failover in OpenWRT, and I did in fact do that at one point and it worked great. I got more use out of the plan by putting the SIM in a different old phone and using it as a "pager" for work, though, so this changeover is currently manual, which hasn't really been an issue.)
Office—just Internet
I… actually can't remember this happening? Most offices I've worked in have had redundant uplinks and reasonably professionally-managed local networks, making Internet outages pretty rare. What did happen was:
Office—power outage
I worked for several years at a job whose office lost power hilariously frequently, something like four to six times a year on average. If the outage went for more than half an hour or so, everyone went home. This was before laptops with a whole work day's worth of battery were commonplace, so you probably couldn't work for more than a few hours with no power, and the UPSs for network equipment wouldn't last even a fraction that long. (This building actually had a generator in an enclosure, but I never saw it running. Maybe we weren't paying the landlord enough for backup power?)
There's another somewhat related case, though:
Major Clod Service Provider outage
Remember the big AWS S3 outage in February 2017 that took down a solid chunk of the Internet? I sure do, because all our infrastructure at work was on AWS, so we were 100% down for the duration and could do absolutely nothing about it. We updated our status page to blame Amazon and everyone went home. I could in principle have written code offline, but most of my day-to-day work required some interaction with our hosted infrastructure (debugging customer-reported issues, for instance), so in practice, without having prepared to work offline, there wasn't much I could do.
Is it the internet or all networking? If it’s local networking too, I guess I have to fix it. If it’s the internet only, then it’s probably not my problem so I can still watch stuff on plex, or I might take a nap. There’s almost no component of my work that is on a local computer.