A world without the internet seems impossible today. Yet, we somehow experienced early October 2021, when Facebook and its family of apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp were impacted by a massive global outage that plunged the services, businesses and people who rely on them into chaos.

The outage lasted over five hours, and the impact was severe and far-reaching. More than 3.5 billion people worldwide use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp to interact with friends and family, disseminate political messages, and grow their businesses through advertising and public outreach. Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, which led to unintended consequences such as people being unable to get into shopping websites or sign in to their smart TVs, thermostats and other internet-connected devices.

It’s not unusual for technology to fail but for a Tech giant such as Facebook to experience such an outage means that no business is safe. Big or small, your business will be affected if the internet shuts down, even for just a few hours. 

The internet has become an integral part of our daily lives in the last few years. Everything from banks and hospitals to the military and public utility systems today is dependent on the internet in some way or another.

So can you imagine what it would be like if the internet suddenly went down? 

A network outage could be devastating to your company’s operations. No matter how long or short that outage can be, your business can seriously be crippled if you don’t do anything to prevent it. 

While all businesses would lose clients and revenue if the internet went down, small firms may suffer the most. Small businesses that can’t afford to “take the day off” would have to become cash-only enterprises and rely on manual systems – could your business survive this? 

To counter such disruptions, you need to have an emergency response plan in place to anticipate and respond to technical issues. You should not only prepare for outages and possible disasters, and consider cyberattacks and people issues. 

Having a good emergency response plan in place should give you some comfort of being able to recover from events within your control, or even those that may be a little left field. But the key is having a plan. 

You will never really know what could happen next. It might sound far-fetched, but being prepared is never a bad option…