Small Business Attack – Backhoe

Yes, you read the headline correctly.

Several years ago, I was working as a web developer and security admin for a small development house.  We were located at one end of a nondescript building in the middle of a tiny little town.  One day I’m working and suddenly everything goes dark.

And by “everything”, I mean everything. My office was the same as the server room, it was lit by a single overhead fluorescent and the glow of a few monitors and lots of little blinky lights. When the backhoe doing sewer work hit the main line, everything went dark and I was suddenly sitting in a tiny little pitch black room rapidly rediscovering my latent claustrophobia.

Luckily for me, I had a cell phone that could double as a flashlight in such a situation. I found my way to the door and met the rest of my coworkers to find out that the entire building was without power, Internet and phone. Business was at a complete standstill.

We were dead on the Internet. No one could reach us. And all of our clients were running that day’s production.

What could we do?