Can You Plan For “The Big Cell Network Outage”?

AT&T’s cellular network experienced a widespread outage on February 22^nd, 2024.  AT&T reported that this outage was caused by problems related to a software update, and the outage itself lasted several hours.  Not only was AT&T’s network impacted, several other carriers that use AT&T’s network also experienced downtime.  I wrote about this at some length a couple of weeks ago.

“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.”

J.R.R. Tolkien 

Of course, cell phone service outages probably happen more often than you realize.  T-Mobile had a day-long, nationwide outage in June of 2020, and again in February of 2023.  Verizon had regional outages in April 2022 and June 2023, and has had rolling outages since February 2017  in some cities as they continue to retire copper wire infrastructure.  AT&T had regional outages in May, June, September, and October of 2023, and there was also a multi-state outage following the 2022 Christmas Bombing in Nashville.

Based on that, I think it’s safe to say that cell service outages are inevitable.  Fifteen years ago, businesses didn’t rely nearly as heavily on cellular communications, but today they are vital part of doing business for almost everybody.  Network coverage is now undeniably better, and the quality of calls has also improved, but it’s not just voice communication we worry about these days. Just about everyone has a smartphone and depends on data connectivity, especially in the business world.

Given that outages are inevitable, and that businesses depend tremendously on the availability of the cellular network, what can we do to mitigate business interruptions if that network goes down?  Can we really plan for cell network outages? 

I would contend that we CAN make resiliency plans for cellular network outages.  Moreover, they might be the perfect thing for your business to plan for if you are new to business resiliency.

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

Albert Einstein

Let’s think through the process of how you’d write a plan for a moment. The first thing you’d probably want to do is look at how many people in your business use cellular communications, and how dependent they are on them.  You would maybe look at heavy users of cellular communications and see the kind of work they are doing, since they would be the ones most heavily impacted if cell service went down. You might even be able to measure or estimate how your business might be impacted during an outage.  By going through these steps, you are essentially doing a mini-Business Impact Analysis (BIA) for your cellular network use.  If you are following best practices, a BIA is one of the first things that you do when you start to create resiliency plans.

The next thing you would probably do in creating a plan is figure out a way to communicate with your employees about the outage. In many cases the employees might already know about the outage on their own, but it’s probably not a bad idea to have some communication plan in place to let employees know about the outrage itself and how it may affect their workday.  Creating a communication plan to respond to this kind of incident is simple (maybe you have an e-mail already composed and ready to send out), but just because it’s simple and intuitive doesn’t mean it’s not important.  Creating a crisis communication plan follows best practices and is a common feature of many resiliency plans.

After you’ve planned to let your employees know that you’re dealing with a cellular service outage, then you will want to do your best to keep it from impacting your business. The extent of actions here is going to depend greatly on your business, but if you did that little BIA before, you have a pretty good idea of what that outage can cost you.  Depending on the potential business impact, there may well be financial justification for safeguarding certain employees ability to communicate. It probably isn’t worth giving all your employees satellite phones, landlines, or dual-SIM devices with multi carrier agreements, but there may be a few employees where their ability to communicate is that vital. It might be worth it to give your employees the ability to place calls over Wi-Fi as an alternative network solution. In any case, putting together a set of steps (or multiple, customized sets of steps) to be followed in the event of the cellular network outage is an excellent exercise in resiliency planning.

Finally, that last important step of creating a resiliency plan will come along when you least expect it: sooner or later, you’re going to experience another cell service outage.  That will be the perfect opportunity to put your plan to the test and see how well it works.  Did it address the issues you wanted it to?  Were your critical people still able to work?  Could you activate your communications plan?  Did your plan help mitigate the cost of the outage?  Collecting that feedback and doing a post-incident review and update of your plans can really help improve them.  Post-incident review and plan improvement are also right in line with best practices, so I highly recommend it to everyone.

Now you can see that not only is it possible to plan for that next cellular network outage, it’s also a great exercise for your company to go through.  It’s a common enough business interruption that unfolds in a predictable manner, and your business can definitely benefit if you make some preparations before the next one happens.

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”

Vincent Van Gogh

Want some help getting your thoughts organized, or want to know more about how to build and mature a business resiliency program? Sayers is here to help. The staff in our business resiliency services program has decades of experience, and they’ve probably already created response plans for a business in your industry. We would love to sit down and talk with you about the unique problems your business resiliency program is facing.