O2 outage. Big business lacking leadership skills.

Posted by: Rich 1 on 08 December 2018

I have to ask this, "why haven't businesses carried out a BCM (business continuity management) plan for such instances as mobile outage." I wrote the first one for the company I worked for before retirement. That had to cover all eventualities from complete destruction of offices, reduced workforce due to plague and most importantly, communication outage for mobile operatives and static operations. It can be done at moderate cost although not all non critical business communications can be covered. I'm sure that the emergency services and defence have them in place. Indeed for the company I worked for it was mandatory for our licence to operate and had to be signed off by the HSE. Rich 

Posted on: 08 December 2018 by Gazza

Yes each department where I worked has emergency planning much as you describe, from working from home, travelling to other offices, or even flying to the U.S, if required for business continuity. I guess O2 will be pointing fingers at suppliers. At least they coughed up some extra days without people having write for compensation.

Posted on: 08 December 2018 by David Hendon

The more interesting question is why Ericsson had an out of date certificate that it deployed in a mission-critical role and why it took so long to unwind the problem.

Quite ironic that Ericsson failed just as half the world is worrying about Huawei dominance and suggesting that all western countries should keep Huawei out of 5G and use Ericsson (and Nokia) instead.

best

David

Posted on: 08 December 2018 by Rich 1

As David said, why was an out of date certificate used? Human error, incompetents or get the update done ASAP without due consideration to someone else double checking such things as expiration dates. Unforgivable really. That doesn't excuse smaller businesses not having communication backup such as a backup phone system that's on a different network from your main system. A simple SIM change is all it takes in most cases. Rich