I was going to write this post on Wednesday and it would have just been titled 'Crisis'. Two days and positive movement has seemed to lessen the threat.
On Thursday, I started my day with almost frantic messages from the Theodora Ghana team that their internet was completely unstable and unusable. As we had a very early Rotary meeting they manage (acting as host, running slides, etc.), I had to jump in. I then started hearing from others in Ghana about lack of internet.
It turned out this was no minor issue. All four of the underseas cables carrying internet traffic from South Africa to Europe were damaged. All of them! Approximately 8 countries including Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, & Benin were affected and it was almost a complete outage. Even banks were unable to function. I was unable to reach anyone on my team.
As I finally learned what the issue was, a grim thought started to come into my head. We were out of business. We would not be able to communicate with clients. We could not do any work for them. I started to think of options such as going to some U.S. providers. But I didn't really think we could pull that off because of cost, time, and the inability to communicate to even find out what to do.
On Saturday, I decided to try a regular phone call and reached my manager. On Sunday, there was some internet and we were connecting through WhatsApp. We determined regular mobile phone communication would work (but it is expensive). Also that they could get most of their work done if they worked late at night when there were fewer people on line.
We'll see how things go today. It seems that we will be able to function.
2 comments:
Wow! I did not realize how much of our internet still goes through cables. I'm impressed that you found a way to continue most of your work.
Glad to hear the crisis was averted!!
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