One of the reasons I’m a keen defender of the legacy mainstream media is that it’s been designed to be much more robust and reliable than internet based news and entertainment platforms.
We saw another example of this yesterday when issues with Amazon Web Services took out huge swathes of web based businesses for much of the day.
More than a thousand services were affected according to the BBC. It’s all very well having resilience and backup plans at your end within your office, but if the services you rely on are all down at once at a server level, there’s not much you can do.
The experts say these outages are happening more often and we’ll just have to get used to them. Whether it’s deliberate sabotage or technical cock ups, they serve to underline how reliant much of our lives are on what amounts to a few key nodes.
That’s quite different from the model used by legacy media such as TV or radio stations delivered via a network of transmitters. Radio licensed under the old IBA regime had to meet incredibly exacting technical standards, right down to the quality of the studio doors and thickness of the soundproof glass. They also had to demonstrate backup plans including alternative locations to ensure they would be able to continue to broadcast in the event of extreme weather or an attack on their premises.
The whole point was that if the rest of the world stopped, radio, at least, would be able to continue, delivering the essential information we would need.
Work is going on at the major radio groups to improve their resilience and DAB+ should prove to be very secure and reliable. But what it you listen through their apps or website? That’s much more of a challenge. And there are a multitude of services that run pretty much on autopilot with what I consider fairly flimsy connections between the studio/playout system and the transmitter (if there even is one).
It’s the same with print media. Legend has it Rupert Murdoch launched the ‘Scottish Sun’ as a backup plan if striking workers blockaded his Wapping printing press. Production could be quickly switched to Glasgow and they’d still be able to get something out each day. What’s the equivalent if your favourite Substack goes down?
I was stunned on a recent trip to McDonald’s to find them unable to process any orders because the electronic ordering systems were down. You’d think taking an order, cooking food and taking money for it would all be something that could be done without any IT. Not any more, at least, not in McDonald’s.
All this makes us vulnerable and as an experienced training provider, delivering many of our services online, it’s something we think about a lot here at Comsteria. We work hard and invest to make our services as reliable as possible. But we can’t guard against every outage. When that happens, businesses will succeed or fail on the quality of their communication.
When we talk about crisis communication with clients, we ask them to come up with crisis scenarios they think they’re likely to encounter so that we can practice their response. It can be quite harrowing at times discussing the various horrors they come up with. While we do work with those themes, I also make the point, that statistically, any business is far more likely to encounter a fire, flood or some sort of IT systems failure, including a cyber attack.
You might find there’s more you can do to prevent or manage these incidents than you thought at first. But at the very least, you can think about, and practice, how you would communicate in the event of that sort of outage.
Wishing you a smooth and hassle free day!
