How to Make the Most From a Service Outage

Outages come in all shapes and sizes, and with this past week filled with outages across internet providers, tech giants and streaming companies alike – it bears asking, what can you do during an outage to make sure you stay as productive as possible?

In 2020, this topic has taken an added layer of complexity – while traditionally the solution to an outage centred largely around offline office tasks and team huddles, in the age of remote workforces reliant on technology to connect – an outage becomes exceedingly problematic.

We’ve put together a quick list of tips that can help you stay productive during an outage.

Try backups – depending on the outage type

Depending on the type of outage your facing, it can often be worthwhile trying some backup devices that serve as a work around for the issue at hand.

• For power outages, a laptop and mobile hotspot can ensure you’re back online and not missing out on valuable time
• For internet outages, it’s worth trying a mobile hotspot or tethering from your mobile device
• Dependent on the type of outage or issue on a cloud platform, it can be worth trying to use it on an alternative device. This will help determine whether there are issues with your primary machine or the service as a whole, and any added information you can provide our technicians when you contact us, will go a long way in speeding up diagnosis of the issue.
• If your home network isn’t playing nice, perhaps consider working offsite for the day.

Call your team and check in

Whether or not you can find alternatives during an outage, it’s worth jumping on a call with your team mates to a) determine whether they’re affected too and b) come up with a plan of attack to keep busy during the outage. And plus, with systems down, it may allow time for your team to ask questions and have discussions that they may otherwise have not had the time for.

Complete your offline tasks

While this can be somewhat more difficult when you are working away from the office, in times of an outage, it can be a great time to tend to those things that you can’t justify during a busy workday. Perhaps it’s time to properly set up your home workstation or clear out your desktop – there are various administrative tasks which can fill up your time and boost your productivity once your back online.

Compose drafts and tame your inbox

While generally thought of as quite unproductive, an outage can prove a great time to get your inbox under control. We can all fall victim to an unruly inbox from time to time, but just because your internet may be down, it doesn’t mean you can’t go through, draft responses to and delete your emails. Who knows, you may even clear them out entirely!

Read and plan

If all else fails, take the outage as time to go through and consume critical information that you may have put off. Plan for important upcoming items and ensure that once back online, you’re ready to power ahead.

Tools to monitor outages

In initial moments when you think you’re being affected by an outage, it serves well to determine the scale of the issues – numerous tools across the web have been designed to report on mass outage complaints. Websites such as Down Detector can be a handy tool in determining if your outage is limited to your device or is part of a wider issue.