Cable, Internet, Outages, and an Existential Crisis
Sara Strohschein
Existential crisis...
An existential crisis is the unease people experience about meaning, choice, and freedom in life...Existential anxiety tends to arise during transitions and reflects difficulty adapting...
Recently, my cable and internet went out thanks to “system upgrades” by my provider. After about an hour of putzing around the house, I found myself challenged trying to adapt to the change and repeatedly went to my phone to check when service might be restored. I hate to admit it, but I was becoming anxious and angry. Of course, that led me to begin questioning if I had become overly dependent on my devices and electronics, leading to a small existential crisis. How will I order from Amazon, have my groceries delivered, and shop? Truly a first-world series of problems. Thankfully, service was restored within a few hours, and my world returned to normal.
The situation also made me ponder how, as a society, we are tied to the conveniences that computers, the “cloud,” the internet, AI, and our devices bring. We recently experienced the negative impact of a problem with Amazon Web Services wrought. Business operations, financial and e-commerce solutions, supply chain and delivery processes, as well as personal use items such as smart home devices, were all affected.
This “outage,” as well as other recent disruptions to web/cloud-based services, once again reminds us of the risks associated with relying on a single-source provider, particularly for critical functions. It also points to the need for redundancy to prevent a problem in one area from causing a global organizational issue.
Have you taken a critical look at the dependency on these types of services in your business? If you are using a cloud-based payroll service, how will you get your employees paid if that service becomes unavailable? How will you ensure your 401(k) funding is done within the required timeframes if the electronic system is down? How will you receive payments or pay vendors if you’ve relied on ACH payments? How will you track orders and delivery commitments?
It might be time to take stock of your current situation, develop your strategy, and update your emergency action plan to be prepared for the next outage. I’m pretty sure it will come!
