The whole office is down. What actually happens?

Every provider publishes a response time. Far fewer will tell you what the words mean or what actually happens in the first hour, so here it is.

What counts as business down. This is the definition that matters, because it decides which commitment your emergency falls under. We treat it as business down when a system that stops people working is unavailable: the internet is out, the server is down, nobody can reach email, the line of business software will not load for anyone, a location is offline, or a security incident is in progress. It is about impact rather than about which device broke. One person with a dead laptop is a standard issue even though it is a disaster for that person. The whole front desk unable to take payments is business down even if the cause turns out to be small.

If you are not sure which one you have, call it in as business down and let us sort out the classification. We would rather downgrade it than find out at four o'clock that you had been waiting politely since nine.

The first hour, in order:

• First contact within 15 minutes, for clients on a managed agreement. A person, not an automated acknowledgment. The point of that call is to establish scope quickly: who is affected, when it started, what changed. Break-fix and hourly callers get a real effort rather than a commitment, and contract clients come first when both land at once.
• Work underway within the hour. That is our commitment for anything business down. In practice remote work usually starts on the first call, because the person you reach can get into your environment while you are still on the phone.
• Onsite within one to two hours if it needs hands, for clients on a managed agreement. Most of the time it is inside an hour. There is a separate article on onsite response with the detail.
• Updates on a schedule, not on request. You should not have to chase us for news during an outage. For anything extended, you get a named point of contact and updates at an agreed interval, even when the update is that we do not know yet.

Three things worth doing on your side while you wait, because they genuinely shorten the call:

• Establish who is affected. Everyone, one department, or one person. This single answer eliminates most of the possible causes.
• Check whether it works on a phone with Wi-Fi turned off. A phone on cellular is outside your network. If it works there, the problem is in your building.
• Find out whether anything changed. A power cut overnight, a vendor onsite yesterday, a software update, somebody moving furniture. The honest answer is often yes and nobody connects it.

Afterward. A business down event gets a root cause analysis rather than just a closed ticket, so you find out why it happened and what changes to stop it happening again. That is covered in its own article in the Beyond break-fix topic.