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Via The Guardian:
“Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.
The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.
Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt’s communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.
The line in question runs under the Mediterranean, from Palermo in Italy to Alexandria in Egypt. It is not clear what caused the break. The cable is one of only a handful of connections, and part of the world’s longest undersea cable, 24,500 miles long, running from Germany, through the Middle East and India before terminating in Australia and Japan.
Reports suggested that the lack of alternative routes for internet traffic meant only a small proportion of surfers were managing to get online. Egyptian officials said that around 70% of the country’s online traffic was being blocked, while officials in Mumbai said that more than half of India’s internet capacity had been erased, which could have potentially disastrous consequences for the country’s burgeoning hi-tech industry.
“There has been a 50% to 60% cut in bandwidth,” Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India told Reuters.”
How much money was lost because of this is anyone’s guess, but I bet it runs at least in the tens of millions of dollars in potential business loss. This brings a point I previously wrote about: what if it is all over today? I know you may think it is unrealistic however, circumstances happen! For those who had an exclusive and lucrative deal with an office in the Twin Towers in NYC in 01 it was just as unrealistic as my words here. What if there is no internet tomorrow? what if advertising as we know it is dead? What if tracking is no more possible and no other business model exist to quickly replace the pay-per-click model? How long can you float? Can you STILL retire rich? Your domains may have some value, may not. I know, “It can’t happen”, “It won’t happen”, or so they said thousands of times before.
The solution? At some point in your business life you must diversify. Have 5% of your net worth aside for rainy days. How is it going to help? As I’m sure you are quite optimistic about your future plans (when it comes to our own plans, aren’t we all?) 5% of your net worth, if you work towards that goal, is not impossible to set aside. If everything goes by your plan then you won’t notice any of it. If everything goes wrong, that 5% will set you up in the very top of smart investors in the world during tough times.
The scenario above is no difference than a business running the “Hit By A Bus” Scenario but instead of thinking of one key personnel loss, think about your business model.
Are you prepared? And if not, should you? I believe not that you should - you must!
Have a great day!
Sahar
The majority of the users affected were back online relatively quickly due to redundancies in their providers’ systems. Those with marginal providers got hurt. So I would add: diversify your resources so there is a fallback position. Use a data provider with multiple locations and redundancy at every level. Don’t host your own servers (repeat five times!) Use Amazon, Google or a big server provider.Have everything critical to your business duplicated in at least two geographically diverse locations (this includes people) and remove backups everyday.
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I would guess this is for the serious business more then to individuals. For us, we do have our own server farms. Forget Amazon, if you use their servers they have complete access to your data. I know, “they are too big, they don’t need your data” .. I don’t fall for it.
Sahar
Sahar -
I hate to tell you this but I was to by a friend in Human Resources the other day that “getting hit by a bus” planning is no longer politically correct. I suppose because it implies someone being put in a painful position.
We are now supposed to plan this way, “What if the IT guy wins the lottery and never comes back to work?”
But I think that you are right about planning for events that we cannot see or do not know about.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently wrote two books about this type of thinking. The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. Basically the premise is that even the observation of one million white swans does not justify the statement “all swans are white.” There is no way to know that somewhere out there a black swan is not hiding, disproving the rule and nullifying our “knowledge” of swans.
It is always important for us to test our own knowledge and reasoning and bias towards certain outcomes. If the first ten times you bought domains you lost tons of money you might reason that domains were bad investments (and they were - to you). So, we should also ask ourselves, if the first ten times we bought domains it was profitable, does that mean it will always be a profitable venture? No, not necessarily.
Like Chuck Yeager used to say “You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.”
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Steve,
Got “The Black Swan” from a friend (Kamal), read it, didn’t really get it. Bought the audio book - fell asleep at chapter two. As for politically correct, I’m sure losing money (losing your business model) can be a painful experience, so maybe you are correct
Sahar
More background information here:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/in-cairo-seizing-the-day-but-not-the-internet/index.html?hp
The mood soured at Internet cafes, as it did in the few Wi-Fi-enabled coffee shops of Zamalek, an upper-class Cairo neighborhood popular among expatriates. Business was slow. Clients came and went without ordering a thing - they came for in hopes of a Web connection.
The rumor mill, unimpeded by the loss of its most high-tech organ, ran high. Text messages and phone calls - the last immediate forms of communication left, apart from actual conversation - bustled with conspiracy theories:
These are the first stages of an American attack on Iran.
And here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a3tADKd_tY3g&refer=europe
“The majority of our IT companies, BPOs and call centers which are using the Atlantic route for dialing to the U.S. East Coast have been badly affected,” Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Provider Association of India, said by telephone from New Delhi today. Flag Telecom’s cable “has lost 50 to 60 percent capacity,” he said.
With repairs not due to begin until February 4, the break will likely have an adverse effect on connectivity for those attending the ICANN meeting in Delhi that starts on February 9.
Anyway, the event’s a stunning reminder of how Net-dependent the entire planet has become — as well as how critical it is for western national security, as even now a successful cyber-attack could have crippling economic consequences.
Sahar -
Those books can get pretty boring, pretty quick. I am reading the aggressive - conservative investor by Marty Whitman of the Third Avenue Value fund and it can put you to sleep fast.
I have a four page summary of the Black Swan that I will send to you that you can read in about 10 minutes. It’s all you really need to know!
SGB