When the internet goes down, minutes feel like hours. Understanding what's actually happening \xE2\x80\x94 and what determines how fast it's fixed \xE2\x80\x94 helps you respond and, better, prevent it.
Common Causes
- Physical damage: a cut fiber line (construction, accidents) \xE2\x80\x94 a leading cause of major outages.
- Carrier network issues: problems upstream in the provider's network.
- Equipment failure: a failed router, firewall, or ONT on your end.
- Power and configuration problems on-site.
What Determines Recovery Time
This is where your SLA earns its cost. A dedicated circuit with a committed mean-time-to-repair gets prioritized and fixed within a guaranteed window; best-effort broadband may be "next business day." See what an SLA covers.
The fastest recovery is no downtime at all: with diverse redundancy and automatic failover, a cut line or carrier issue switches traffic to a backup in seconds \xE2\x80\x94 your team barely notices. See redundancy and failover.
Be Ready Before It Happens
- Know your carrier's support escalation path and SLA in advance.
- Have a backup connection on different infrastructure.
- Keep critical functions (payments, phones) able to run on the backup.
We design connectivity that minimizes both the odds and the impact of outages. See the cost of downtime and our services.
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