Surviving Techpocalypse

I thought it might be worth sharing our internet experience this morning in clinic, and outlining how we overcame the problem. If you, like us, are a small business that doesn’t have a big budget to allocate resources specifically for disaster recovery or resilience, this might come in handy!

This morning all our Cloud Software Service providers seemed to be offline. Odd! Facebook was still up, so it must be a problem with the software suppliers, was my initial thought. But no, a little more googling and it became apparent that the problem was more widespread.
Downdetector is a great site for seeing internet outages in realtime on a map; and for a more global look at things, this Outage Analyser might be interesting, too.
Once it became apparent that it was a BT issue, there were one easy solution that which meant within 5 minutes we were all back up again, albeit at a reduced speed.

A smartphone can keep your business connected when BT is down.

We use iPhones exclusively here, and chose Giffgaff as our network provider as they offer fantastic and very flexible tethering options and plans that we can change on a monthly basis as our needs arise. It’s perfect for us as our occasional trips away inevitably involve large spikes in our data usage requirements.
Apple have a simple support doc to guide you through it. There are similar options for sharing with Android and Windows phones, and googling it should give you a quick answer.

I hope this helps someone. Many of us have smartphones with us 24/7 and in an emergency it’s sometimes easy to forget how useful they can be. And I suppose that it goes without saying that planning and testing this in advance makes having to do it when it’s necessary all the easier.