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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, 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?
I get a discount, but not free, no.
That's a bummer. I worked for an ISP for over a decade and the free internet and cable was the best perk of being there.
Damn, I got free cable but only moderately discounted internet when I did my time at a provider. We still had to pay full price for the unlimited data addon too, just to rub a little salt in there.
I feel for the people who work for Spectrum in my area (they have a pretty large presence), as the closest area with them as a provider is a couple hundred miles away on the other side of the state (where the only jobs available with them are retail stores and field techs). Getting cheap/free service is like the main fringe benefit of working for an ISP, I'd be mad if I couldn't use that perk.
The company I worked for was actually one of the companies that merged to become Spectrum. From everything I hear, the new globbed together company is worse in every way.
That's kind of wild
When I worked at an ISP, I got... extremely tiny discounts on extremely outdated phones... Deals strictly worse than anything available on amazon.
Job perks!
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.
Usually my boss expects me to use my phone as a hotspot, at least temporarily.
I hope if that is his expectation for you to use your mobile data that the company reimburses you for using it that month
I've had them offer reimbursement but the process is such a hassle I rarely bother, I never use even come close to my data cap every month anyway; and my internet rarely goes out for any long period of time.
I can't even make phone calls reliably without wifi calling, so that would be out. Not to mention they don't pay for my phone and I don't have unlimited data.
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.
I'd say "same" as I work for a FAANG now but to my knowledge, this has never actually happened here since I joined in 2018. I gotta imagine they have multiple redundant backhauls.
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.
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.
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.
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
I work from a big honking desktop, so a coffee shop is generally out of the question. If I had an extended issue (like power being out for days), I have used my personal non-work laptop from another location, but that doesn't really let me do everything.
Oof yeah the last time I worked on a company issued desktop instead of a laptop was like 2015 and thats only because that place was OLD
I use my own computer, work didn't provide it. So, it isn't some old crappy office desktop, but it is probably even less portable that one of those as a result.
It's a small company without a dedicated IT department. As the lead dev/engineer/everything-technical, it would have likely fallen to me anyway since I am the one that handled the purchasing and configuration of workstations for our employees at the main office.
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 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
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
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.
I work with SaaS so I would be completely dead in the water.
I work as some kind of caregiver to a person that is online 24/7.
The following applies to both internet and power outage (except that candles and flashlights are added at appropriate places during a power outage).
After checking everything it's usually trying to set up some book reading. They become restless quite quickly (<15min) so we transition into playing scrabble or backgammon and chatting and overall having a better time than usual.
Depends on the job, and keeping in mind that access to the wider internet isn't massively necessary, it's internal networks that matter. If I'm crewing a show, couldn't matter less, that's all physical work. If I'm in a higher level role at uni or something losing the local network could very easily ruin my day.
I sell fitness equipment whose main selling point is internet streamed fitness content so we can't do much without internet. For that reason, we keep two dedicated hot spots on hand from a different ISP (main internet is Rogers, hotspots are Bell).
Our internet used to be a lot more unreliable but I figured out it was because our tech cabinet was so full of unused crap contractors left after each time we got an upgrade that wires would get pinched causing something to reboot. I finally got a contractor out to clean up our tech cabinet and we have had zero internet issues since.
Thankfully we have run into a situation where both ISPs were down at the same time. If we did, we would probably just close and go home.
i think... everything stops and then ppl go to have a coffee. If it doesn't work for an hour i suppose most ppl call it a day and go back home :)
Internet is not the flesh and bones of my workplace but it is definitely the connective tissue.
...anyway i remember i was working during 11/9 and when the news stroke the internet everything started to sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow down a lot, and so did the work in the office. It took us more or less 15 or 20 minutes to open the page of a news outlet online and check what was the cause because we thought of a server crash (or that someone severed a cable on the bottom of the ocean).
I expect something like that. Maybe more because now we are even more dependant on the internet (everything is on the cloud, we do not use landlines anymore, etc...)
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.
I’m a teacher. It’s occasionally annoying when I want to use some sort of a web applet or what not and the internet’s just not working, but most of the time this would be a good thing for me. That said, I have never experienced the mobile network going out, so at least I always have a backup.
I probably wouldn't notice. I might need to check a message from a customer or look up a size conversion or something, possibly check stock at a local supplier before heading out of the house. All of which I generally do on my phone anyway because my workshop would kill a laptop in fairly short order (and I have no need for one in there), and my phone will fall back to 5G data without even telling me if the local wifi stops providing internet connectivity.
I work hybrid - two days in the office, three wfh. Our work is pretty internet dependent (emails, zoom calls, working online on teams or google drive).
If the internet goes down at the office we wait a while and work on something else in the meantime. If it's out for more than an hour we go home, or go to the co-working space in the building which has a different network (we just moved to a new office building so I haven't tested that out yet).
If I'm wfh and I expect it's a temporary outage, I'll use my phone as a hotspot (I have 350gb of data per month). If it's out longer I will have to find out why and fix it. If it's something that requires a longer repair period there's no shortage of co-working spaces since I'm in the city centre. Or I'll begrudgingly go to the office more often.
I'm answering because I once again had no wifi at work for the first hour and missed a bunch of messages. This new building is less than 2 years old, and it was built about a mile away from the edge of the suburbs. There's zero cell service, but some cell providers have set up wifi (which goes out for me a couple times a month), and there's a "guest" wifi that you have to remember to sign into every couple of days. So in an emergency, don't count on using the wifi calling to call 911. Oh, and our regular phones are all internet based as well and ridiculously unreliable.
So there's "official" wifi/internet as well, for work purposes with a login, but not for phone use. This has also gone out a few times. When it goes out (and it does maybe once a year, unbearably slow 2-3 times a year) - we have reports we can't issue, and a few other things that can't be done, but most of our work we have paper sheets or offline copies of spreadsheets we can use. We have an "emergency binder" that contains these copies on USB drive and paper copies.
I spend all day at the office fixing it. I'm probably running the incident response to figure out why it went down. If the Internet goes out for even half an hour, I'm guaranteed to have a bad day, and I'll be in the office for ten hours or so minimum, communicating about it, investigating it, writing up and approving reports on it, planning to avoid it happening again and so on.
It's always a nightmare scenario
WFH, so I switch to hotspot. There's no reason that shouldn't work, but if it didn't for some reason, it's not the biggest deal — my work proper is done offline, I just wouldn't be able to push any of it until I get connected again.
Some fairly timely experience of this.
For reference I work from home in the UK. Yesterday afternoon the entire Vodafone network went offline from 3pm, so normally I'd switch over to a hotspot from my phone, but guess what that's on a MVNO that uses Vodafone...
Since all of the work systems I use are cloud based not a lot I could get on with, and no way of easily finding out if this was a temporary blip or would be out longer. So essentially lots of twiddling thumbs and sending SMS messages (that was working still thankfully) to update team and try and get any updates at all.
Time of day also made this more awkward, I live about an hour drive from the office and the working day finishes at 5pm, so we're this in the morning I'd have gone into the office, but at 3pm? Not worth a two hour return trip for an hour in the office.
Sounds like an excellent time to take a nap.
I'm working from home, so this can go two ways.
Because of my job, we need our servers running, as they are making us money (not just part of infrastructure). Uf those are down, we are all basically just sitting ducks, we can't do anything.
If internet drops at my plqce, I can jump on hotspot and continue working that way for some time - it is generally slower due to low bitrate here where I live but it can do in time of need. I could also jump in a car and drive somewhere with working internet (be it coffee shop, friend's place or actually office of my employer - all of those would be less than half an hour drive).
I manage a team of developers in a hybrid situation. Our VPN is self-hosted on-prem so if the internet goes out here, it hopefully kicks over to our much slow but very reliable 5G line. If both lines go out then we are without VPN. This hinders our ability to test and deploy some of our services since they live behind the VPN.
This halts our production facility almost entirely. This does not impact the rest of the org that much. Maybe our finance team since they have on-prem VMs for QB and other sensitive data we host on-prem.
For myself, if I'm at home and the internet goes out but my work phone has a 5G connection, I can hotspot from that and run up the company phone bill on data.
A few years back one of the biggests ISPs in the country went out (Canadians everywhere remember the Rogers outage) and we just shut down the office and told everyone to take the day off.