It does happen and the first thing is to remain calm. There is no need to immediately get over excited on something that is beyond your control. The strategic thing is to immediately position yourself for the next plan of action. The Internet connection will eventually be restored and you will be able to access whatever Internet sites you rely on. It’s what you do when you are offline and how you do it that will set you apart from others.
The reason I decided to post this blog is that we had an issue last week that slowed our users from accessing the system. It was beyond our control, yet the vast majority of our customers were very cool and calm, allowed us to identify the problem, waited for it to be corrected and then we updated everyone. It was a very humbling experience to have that many customers not get excited, as well as let us concentrate on moving forward. It would have been too easy for people to complain about their life story, what they cannot do, etc. Instead the VAST majority of our customers just went about their day and simply asked for us to explain what occurred and what we did to fix it once we knew ourselves.
Here is the short version. Digital certificates are electronic files that simply work as an online passport. Digital certificates are issued by a third party known as a Certification Authority such as Thawte. These third party certificate authorities have the responsibility to provide assurance to our website visitors that the website is one that is serving them in a trustworthy manner. There are a few ways to validate the digital certificates, and one of them is the display of a site seal. You see this on the right hand side when typing in your user name and password. It says “Your Data Is Safe, Secured by Thawte” with the picture of a lock. Thawte experienced a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) where hackers attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. In this case the hackers were attempting to disrupt the controls for the site seal. Thawte did take the appropriate security measures to correct the problem which was the slow down we all experienced. Unfortunately they could not update everyone as fast as they were correcting the problem.
Obviously so many other things can happen when using computers over the Internet, and for the most of the time things will work just fine. We get so used to this that it is very easy to “lose it” when things go wrong. In summary, next time things go wrong, take a moment to think about it and react with calm. More good things will happen, including maintaining your health and managing your team and customers. And above all, inform others to maintain expectations. There is nothing wrong telling people you have a problem. It’s avoiding it that can create the challenge.