A closing runs at 4:55 on a Friday and the system is down. What actually happens?

Let us be specific rather than reassuring, because this is a real scenario and it happens.

What we commit to: critical issues get a one hour response. A closing in progress that cannot complete is critical, and it is the definition of critical we apply rather than a lesser category. Our standard hours are Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM Eastern, so a 4:55 call is inside them, and for title clients an after hours path for exactly this scenario is part of the agreement rather than a favor, because Friday afternoons are when closings stack up.

What you should do in the first five minutes, before we are on the line:

• Establish what is actually down. One person's computer, the whole office, the internet, or the vendor's system. Have someone try the same thing on a different machine, and try a phone on cellular rather than office Wi-Fi. This takes ninety seconds and it determines everything about the fix.
• Check the vendor's status page. If your production platform or e-recording provider is having an outage, nothing on your side will help, and knowing that immediately stops a wasted twenty minutes and lets you tell the room honestly.
• If it is your internet, use a phone hotspot for the machine that has to work. Not elegant. One closer tethered to a phone can finish a document set. Set this up in advance so it is a known procedure rather than an experiment at 5pm.

Then the honest part. Some things cannot be fixed in fifteen minutes. If your production system's vendor is down, or a wire cutoff has passed, the answer is not technical. What we can do is tell you fast and definitively which situation you are in, so you can make the call about rescheduling or funding Monday with accurate information rather than waiting and hoping.

Two things that prevent most of this. A backup internet connection that fails over automatically, which is modest money and removes the most common cause outright. And knowing before Friday which parts of your closing process depend on which systems, so that when one is down you know immediately whether you are blocked or merely inconvenienced.