First-World Crisis: You Are Not Connected to the Internet

Yesterday, my fellow countrymen and I were hit with an unexpected case of Internet breakdown.

What began as a mild suspicion that it was just my modem, soon turned into an island concern when our biggest tele provider could not deliver us data on a fine Saturday, of all days.

While it was entertaining to scroll through the rage comments under their Facebook's latest update, I was reminded of my Social Media Management module where my prof talked about the difficulty and importance of crisis communication, hinted by its 4000 level classification (a Honours year module). It dawned on me how shockingly poor and inefficient my telecommunication company has responded to their undoubtedly biggest crisis to date, because for starters, I was left guessing what was going on.

The imperative and logical procedure in cases of emergency, I figure, is not to fix the problem and be hopeful that it'll be settled in a few hours, which was what happened.

The first step should be to keep us informed.

Knowing my countrymen, it is a tall order and presumptuous to use the word "pacify," but given the sudden and rare nature of such incident, they could have made better use of Facebook's ubiquity and instantaneous ability to frequently update their customers. Some facet of predictability, like one update per hour would have been perfect, where bad news is better than no news.

Instead, we were left hanging with sporadic updates, as though they've suddenly remembered an island of baffled customers were still waiting for their response. That meant constant page checking and shaking of disappointed heads, both of which were fuel to an already raging wild fire.

Personally, the biggest letdown was not that this breakdown happened, or that it took them the entire day to fix it, but the capacity of such behemoth organisation to treat their customers as an afterthought. It was so numbing that it took them 4 hours to provide a backup plan (offering waived mobile data charges), when it could have been the first few actions to take. It felt anti-climatic, reluctant, and quite frankly half-assed.


Anyway, what was supposed to be an append to my AFA's post has evolved to deserve its own post, and shall be treated in accordance. As of 7AM this morning, "about 80% of [their] fibre broadband services have been restored, and [the] engineers estimate that [they] will achieve full service restoration in the next few hours."

To that, my good pal Paul concluded, "Wow they can do better than that man."


For me, I'm just glad that I do not have to shut down my modem moments after switching it on. That would spoil the thing rather quickly, according to my mother.