Another day, another outage
Today a car ran into something or other and took out the network for a large chunk of the state. I’m pleased to say that we handled this outage better than our last one: the emergency website went up, though not as quickly as I would have liked, and then we took it down as soon as we could. Campus communications went pretty well too. But there are always lessons learned. Here are ours:
- remember time zones! what may seem like an early morning outage to you was a peak day outage to others. You need to get your emergency site up pronto! The world is flat!
- alert dining and auxiliary services asap so they can activate their alternative credit card workaround as early as possible
- be prepared to handle the mass communication BACK. I sent a campus-wide email regarding the outage and was a bit unprepared for the hundreds of responses asking things like “will my email be saved” and “what happened to the people in the car?” etc. Next time, I’ll send the mail from our generic help desk account.