It’s 9:12am. You’ve made your first coffee of the day, opened your inbox, and are halfway through replying to a customer query.

All of a sudden, nothing.

Your emails won’t load, then you notice the phone system is quiet. Someone from the other side of the office shouts, “has the internet gone?”, then someone else says the same and within seconds, no one can do anything.

Now you’re faced with the most frustrating question of the day:

How do I work without internet?

We don’t like to admit it, but many of us assume the internet is like electricity or gravity; always there, quietly doing its job, consistently. Until one day, it isn’t…

Outages happen more often than you think. Damage to the fibre line, power cuts, storms, ISP maintenance, or someone in the office has accidentally unplugged the router.

Whether it’s down for 5 minutes or 5 hours, when the internet goes down, productivity tanks.

Here’s what’s likely to stop working within the first five minutes:

• Your VoIP phone system (Bye-bye inbound calls)
• Emails and Teams (Say hello to awkward silences)
• Cloud Drives like OneDrive or Google Drive (Suddenly empty folders)
• CRM, quoting, and ticketing systems (If it’s in the cloud, it’s probably inaccessible)
• EPOS and card machines (Can’t take payments, but sure, we can write some IOU’s)
• Remote workers (now officially “unreachable”)

Basically, if it relies on Wi-Fi, broadband or syncing with “the cloud”, it isn’t going to work.

An unexpected outage isn’t just inconvenient. It delays projects, causes frustration for customers, and makes your team feel like they’re stuck in a tech-themed escape room. When core systems go offline, like phones, files and payment terminals. Productivity drops sharply, and so does your ability to serve clients.

Grab a pen, tally up your yeses, and try not to panic:

• Do you have a backup internet connection, like a 4G/5G failover?
• Can your team access important files offline (not just “in the cloud”)?
• Does your phone system still work without Wi-Fi?
• Could you reach your key systems from another location?
• Do you have a plan for how to handle downtime (even a scrappy one)?

If you’re answering mostly “No” or “Urm… maybe?”, now might be time for a quick rethink.

Good news: you don’t need a military-grade bunker or a tech team the size of NASA to stay productive when things stop working. You just need a few smart tweaks:

1. Add a mobile failover: A business-grade router with automatic 4G/5G can keep you online if your broadband were to start throwing a tantrum.
2. Enable offline file access: Sync your most-used documents locally, so you are never locked out of your own content.
3. Check your phone system’s resilience: Make sure it can forward calls to mobiles or backup devices when the internet is down.
4. Write a “Plan B” ( that doesn’t live in the cloud): Even a simple document covering who does what, where to check status updates, and how to inform clients can make a huge difference.
5. Have a chat with your IT team: See what they have in place or what they plan to do when worst-case scenario does occur.

Losing internet access for the day probably won’t ruin your business, but it will test your setup, systems and patience. While you can’t always control when an outage happens, you can control how painful it is.

Think of it like car insurance. You hope you’ll never need it… but you’ll be extremely glad it’s there when someone crashes into your Monday morning.