1. Communication when everything is down
The Shock started with a strange silence. No alarms. No obvious outage. The corporate chat was unusually quiet. Messages were typed, sent, and stayed there. Emails piled up in outboxes, unsent. People assumed a minor network issue. A local disruption. Something transient. After all, a handful of websites were still loading.
An hour passed. Impatience grew. The first instinct was to contact IT. That, too, failed. IT communication ran through a ticketing system - unavailable as well.
A few people called. Not the official numbers (those lived in directories that required authentication) but old, personal phone numbers, exchanged long ago and never updated. Those calls did not connect either. Lines were already busy. Voicemail boxes were full.
Failure mode
The Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 took down Slack, Zoom and Snapchat. In a widespread disruption, your first problem is not customer communication. It is internal coordination. When access to cloud providers, SaaS tools, and online services is partially or fully disrupted, most SaaS companies discover that their teams cannot even talk to each other - let alone fix systems or communicate externally.
In large-scale outages, the following often happen simultaneously:
- Slack, Teams, or internal chat tools are unreachable,
- Corporate email is unavailable,
- Identity providers become unreachable,
- Monitoring and alerting systems stop sending notifications,
- Documentation and runbooks are inaccessible.
The result is not just confusion. It is organizational paralysis. Employees don’t know what the current situation is, who is taking action, or how to report progress. This is a failure of communication design, not engineering.
Objectives
Your internal communication setup must enable four things:
- Reachability: Key people must be able to reach each other quickly.
- Authority clarity: Everyone must know who decides what.
- Situation awareness: A shared understanding of what is broken, what is unknown, what is being worked on.
- Action coordination: Tasks must be assigned, tracked, and acknowledged - even informally.
Solution: the Crisis Communication Stack
Layer 1: Emergency Reachability (Non-Negotiable)
Purpose: Reach decision-makers and operators when everything else fails.
The most fundamental requirement in a crisis is reachability. Key decision-makers and operators must be able to contact one another quickly, without depending on a single online service. This often means falling back to technologies that feel mundane but are resilient: phone calls, SMS, or pre-established phone trees.
For this to work, contact information must exist in a form that is accessible without the internet or corporate systems. Large disruptions might provide cover for cyber attacks, so phone numbers can be a first way to enable key stakeholders prove their identity.
Key people must be able to reach each other within minutes, even under degraded conditions. If that is not possible, the organization is effectively offline. A phone tree should be setup to ensure everyone in the organization can be reached.
- Printed or offline contact list including phone numbers, pre-loaded in phones for authentication of the key stakeholders
