“Have you tried switching it off and on again?”

Thanks to a mass outage at BT Openreach, today was hosted by 4G with guest appearances from 3G and occasionally the OG: 2G. 

This nationwide meltdown caused the Twitterati to pause and think, take to twitter and post IT Crowd memes and for us to wonder What in the Donald Drumpf did we do before we could Google everything? Videos of grumpy cats playing pianos were definitely not a thing in that era.

“To the Pub! That other Social Network I’ve heard so much about!”

As a digital agency, our work is heavily reliant on the internet for transmission of data and use of certain software packages. Of course we take regular back-ups, but an outage on this scale is like having both hands tied behind your back whilst trying to type the works of Shakespeare.

Thankfully, due to this being a case of all of the internet not working for all of the blessed BT customers, it wasn’t our phone ringing off the hook during the panic. We stalled ten minutes to have a cup of tea, take a wide screen break (switching to our mobiles), and joke about what might have happened to cause the outage – terrorism, anarchy, Anonymous, or worse Jeff from IT at British Telecom leaning on the wrong button? If it was Jeff, he’s definitely been fired. Sorry Jeff.

Truthfully after all that, development work continued and anything that could be done remotely was. We tethered our creative director to mobile 4G so he could make a print deadline without physically imploding.

It was similar to when you leave your mobile at home for the day, the initial panic of separation anxiety soon subsides to resuming business-as-almost-normal and then suddenly you realise you have gotten more done in the time without it. I’m not saying we could survive without it, but we’re more resilient and have alternatives if necessary. Now to the Pub!