I woke up this morning to the news that Microsoft was having something of a spectacular meltdown. Outlook, Teams and various other things that people rely on to get through their working day were experiencing problems, and for one glorious moment I thought, "Well, that's Friday taken care of then."
And then I remembered I use Google.
Bugger. Apparently I still have to go to work.
As I was getting ready, listening to the phone-in on Radio 5 Live, the scale of the problem really started to sink in. Because whilst it's easy to joke about an unexpected day off, for an awful lot of businesses this is going to be a hugely expensive and time-consuming problem. Meetings cancelled, documents inaccessible, deadlines missed, customers waiting for responses and, for some, an entire working day potentially lost.
And it got me thinking about something that goes beyond the technology itself. What happens to your business communication when the thing you use to communicate stops working?
We've become so accustomed to everything being available at the touch of a button that we rarely consider what happens when the button doesn't work. Our emails, calendars, customer information, booking systems and documents are all beautifully interconnected. It's incredibly efficient. Until it isn't.
Now, I'm not suggesting that every small business needs to invest in a second IT infrastructure, employ a disaster recovery specialist or start communicating exclusively by carrier pigeon. But I do think there's a very good argument for having a conversation about what your business does when its usual systems fail.
Let's look at it from the customer's perspective for a moment. If I've emailed you about booking your venue, buying your product or using your services, and I don't hear back from you, I don't necessarily know that your email system has fallen over. I might simply assume you're not interested in my business. If I'm waiting for confirmation of an appointment or an important delivery, the silence becomes a problem for me, regardless of what's causing it for you.
And that's where communication becomes particularly important.
A simple update on your website or social media, assuming you can still access them, could make an enormous difference. Letting people know that you're experiencing problems, explaining how they can contact you in the meantime and managing expectations around response times doesn't fix the technology, but it does help protect the relationship you have with your customers.
And it's worth thinking about whether those alternative routes actually exist. If your website enquiry form feeds into your Outlook inbox, telling people to use the form instead of emailing you might not solve very much. If your entire customer contact list is sitting somewhere you can't access, picking up the phone becomes considerably more difficult.
The time to work out your alternative communication route is probably not when you're already in the middle of discovering that you haven't got one.
There's also the question of what happens when everything comes back online. A day's worth of emails arriving at once, enquiries to catch up on, meetings to rearrange and customers who have been waiting for answers. The technology might be fixed, but the disruption to your business doesn't necessarily end there.
And for those of us whose systems are still working? Perhaps it's worth considering that the businesses we're trying to communicate with might not be quite so fortunate. I've already decided that some of my planned business development emails can wait until Monday. There's very little point in sending a carefully considered email today if it's going to arrive alongside a mountain of messages that somebody is desperately trying to get through.
Sometimes good communication is as much about knowing when not to communicate as it is about knowing what to say.
I'm certainly not sitting here feeling smug about my choice of cloud provider. There but for the grace of Google go I. Next time, it could quite easily be me wondering how on earth I'm supposed to run several businesses without access to the things I rely on every day.
But perhaps today's events are a useful reminder that whilst technology is an incredibly important part of how we do business, it isn't the business itself. The relationships we have with our customers, the trust we've built and the way we look after people when things don't go according to plan are rather more important.
And those are things we can still do something about, even when the digital world is having a bit of a lie-down.
In the meantime, my Google account is functioning, my coffee is hot and I've apparently got no excuse not to get on with my day.
So much for an unexpected long weekend.