Wednesday 30th of January is offline day

Today we suffered a major internet connection breakdown in Dubai.
According to Gulfnews,

“Dubai: UAE telecom service providers, etisalat and du, were badly hit on Wednesday due to the breakdown of internet connection and international calls after a major cable in the Mediterranean Sea snapped.
Officials from the service providers were unable to say when the issue will be resolved as the submarine cable system operators (FLAG Telecom and SEA-ME-WE 4) are responsible for repairing the cable.
Etisalat, however, said in a statement that it was able to re-route the traffic through its network partners in Asia, Europe and UAE.”

We move a big part of our “operations” in the cloud an particularly in the hands of Google.
We are now using Google apps for domain to manage our emails, todo list (thanks to the RTM crew, their Gmail integration rocks), calendar, IM and office documents.
Switching to Gmail was a relief after managing our own mail server while trying to fight spam for the last 6 years.

But today was a painful day: impossible to log on GMail; downloading emails with Thunderbird took ages and forget about sending any file bigger than 1Mb.
The basic HTML view was kind of usable at the end of the day.

Lets hope it will be fixed by tomorrow.

At least we learn something today: be ready to survive major downtime if you are running your business fully online.