Other than writing at this blog, I’m part of a team of specialized individuals who design and develop corporate websites for not too big and not too small business owners. Therefore, when the Taiwan earthquake hit the network lines and affected countries like Malaysia our business was affected as well.
Though we’re not a fully online company (thank goodness) like most Web 2.0 agencies today, there were still obvious effects to our process of working. So what I’m going to share with you is what happened and of course, how bad was the damage caused.
To start it off, here’s a humorous thing. I did not know an earthquake hit Taiwan and our Internet lines were slowed down because of it. *slap forehead*
Due to the common problems of our Streamyx lines slowing down often and the unstable speeds of our Internet lines – even when we don’t have peak hour control like Australia, I just thought maybe it was one of the above that was causing the line to drop so sudden.
But being an active member of Low Yat forum, I learnt that it was a massive Taiwan earthquake that blew out some under sea cables. At the same time later, the whole blogosphere was spreading the news like wildfire and not because they wanted everyone to know but it’s a contest of who can get the news out first.
So it was all in the media and TMNet actively responded that they’re going to route all traffic to backup lines. In the meantime, the address also said the hiccup will only be solved in a week or two. During that time, IT-savvy users switched to proxies from Australia.
Thankfully for us, we already had started 2-3 projects so we didn’t have to use the Internet urgently. However, when we had a referral for a website project later it was terrible. The client requested us to have a look at a reference website that they’d like to follow the concept. Alas because of the slow connection, we had to apologize to the client and inform them that we will only be able to answer their request for a quotation when the Internet line has improved.
The client understood the predicament plaguing us so they decided to wait and we can’t say how much we appreciate and love a client like this.
So if the Internet connection hadn’t improve today, we’re afraid that we might’ve lost a project.
How was your business affected? Or were you really frustrated when the Internet was down?
[tags]Taiwan Earthquake, Business, Money[/tags]