The CenturyLink outage and how to protect your organization

What Happened

Nationwide CenturyLink service internet outages have been reported. This included several 911 outage reports. The CenturyLink CEO had this to say, “The source of the outage was a particular equipment vendor and a malfunction with one of those (network management) cards. … It created an inability for the system to continue to process capacity and it blocked our ability to control those nodes. And so we had to physically go out and shut things down, and restart them on that transport layer. Meanwhile, we’re moving circuits off to other capacities. It was an equipment failure that had a more dramatic impact than we would have wanted it to have.” While these outages were sporadic and only lasted a short amount of time, any outage can be disastrous. This is especially true when it comes to making emergency calls.The scariest thing about this situation, is that there was no physical disaster that caused the outage. Responsibility is not being fully taken by anyone. It’s situations like this that make disaster recovery and planning so important. You never know when there will be an equipment failure. It could be anything from a scheduled maintenance gone wrong, or a construction accident that cuts your last mile. What you do know, is that if you plan ahead for how to deal with these situations, you will rest easy when the time comes.

Improve Your Experience

Have a plan in place that protects you from these outages. Most organizations, especially public safety organizations, have redundancies in place to make sure they can continue communication. However, as we have seen in this situation, these redundancies don’t always work. Teleira offers a satellite and cloud recovery system that allows you to easily reroute communications without having to deal with busy carriers. Because lets be honest, carriers can be difficult enough to get a hold of when they aren’t already dealing with all of the others struggling with the same outages.

Work Now, Relax Later

Disaster situations are stressful to say the least. However, you can minimize stress by using a simple pre-established system. Plan ahead for any outage by building out your recovery plan now. It is already too late to set up a way to recover after an outage occurs. However, if you spend a little now, you won’t have to spend time and money on slow inefficient recovery when the time comes. Teleira’s easy to use interface allows you to pre-set responses and and plan for such an outage. Schedule a quick virtual demo today to learn more about how Teleira’s solutions can help your organization stay protected against communication loss.