When we arrived in the office this morning, two of our team were already here, responding to the dreaded “sites down” alert. Company procedures had been triggered to drag these people out of their beds and into the office to respond.  De-brief with Client Account Managers – start the client notification procedure.

Completing the various network and server tests we apply in these situations – all checked out and the culprit identified – BT (telecoms) had a problem. This was raised with BT Customer Support and (fortunately) 10 minutes later, problem sorted.

This is the first time I’ve experienced such a catastrophic event.  It’s really scary – as if the rug has been taken away from under our feet.  I know how much our clients rely on their web service, many of them literally have all their work online.  So you can imagine how scary it is for us a Client Account Managers.  

I was mightily impressed with the calm professionalism that saw us through the problem and although it was BT who broke / fixed the situation, I am still very comforted to be part of such a professional team.

You can read the BBC news article about the incident here