In the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s untimely death yesterday, many people are noticing a general slow-down on the internet caused by increased traffic to news sites etc.
Google have reported that they actually feared that their network was under attack at one point yesterday due to the massive number of similar “Michael Jackson” search term look-ups around the time when there was still speculation about his fate.
The Twitter network crashed completely (again).
Many news organisations have experienced problems which appear to have continued into today : CNN, BBC, Sky, AOL, CBS, Yahoo and MSNBC all suffered slowdowns.
The additional traffic to these websites is having a knock-on effect on other internet traffic – infact average download times were doubled at around 2.30PM Pacific time yesterday.
This all just goes to show that world-wide news items can affect the fragile internet which we have all grown to depend upon. We all expect it to be there when we need it, but the fact is that the internet does have a finite capacity and it sometimes gets pretty close to being “full”.
It’s encouraging, therefore, that the UK government announced yesterday that a cyber-terrorism plan is in place now that the lack of access to the internet is seen as a potential terrorist target, but if million’s of people’s internet access can be affected by a single news story, are the Government’s plans going to be enough to counter a deliberate attack. What do you think ? Are you going to leave it to trust that the Government’s plans are going to be good enough or are you going to start making some fall-back plans for your business yourself ?
There are things which businesses can do to mitigate their company operations against internet failures – true, if the entire internet is down, many backup solutions will fail, but that’s why it’s so essential to have an up-to-date Disaster Recovery Plan with different options which has been throught-out in advance rather than at the time of most stress. As the saying goes “the best war plans are made in peace time” !
If your company still does not have a DR plan in place, call ACS for help, rather than leaving it to chance – after all, how many people predicted MJ’s sudden demise ? You never know when the unexpected is going to happen.