Website Outages Make Us Realize Just How Much We Rely on the Internet

There’s no doubt about it. Hurricane Sandy has taken a toll on the nation due to the website outages it caused this past week. While the stress and frustration that ensued was unavoidable, many website owners took measures to mitigate the damage done and comminicated via other mediums, such as social media sites. Some of Alertra’s own customers found themselves working to keep customers updated after being notified of downtime caused by the power of the storm. One underlying lesson that many people across the nation learned this past week is just how much we rely on the Internet for our everyday lives.

Lives Are Impacted When Websites Aren’t Available

The power of Hurricane Sandy may not have been as surprising as the effect the hurricane had when it started taking websites down. There’s an old saying that goes, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. That could be said of the websites that were going down as the storm took out hosting servers across the East Coast. Not only businesses were affected by the website downtime many companies were experiencing. It seems that schools were significantly impacted as well.

As one Twitter member, Princess Tye, tweeted, “school website is down -_- i cant even do my homework or project !!!” And Princess Tye isn’t the only one who realized their life was becoming increasingly complicated as Sandy wreaked her havoc across the Web. Twitter member Jorden Hensel stated, “The website I am trying to access is down due to weather conditions in the North...just when I try to do school work the weather stops me.”

Some students may have been breathing a sigh of relief as classes were even canceled due to website outages. Others, however, experienced frustration when trying to get their work done and stay on top of their grades.

Contingency Plans are Key

It’s impossible to prevent all instances of website downtime. What you can do, as we have mentioned before, is have a contingency plan in place just in case Alertra does notify you of an outage that is affecting your site. While downtime of your website may not be as life-impacting as an outage affecting an entire school, chances are that at least a few customers will be inconvenienced by the issue. Keep your backup plan in place and make sure you implement it if and when Internet downtime does occur.