Behind the Badge
When the digital world feels broken and favored services stop working — from Disney+ and HBO Max to business apps like Canva and Venmo — it may be a widespread outage.
This most recently happened in October, following the crash of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a powerful revenue-generating subsidiary of the Amazon retail giant. Cloud networks like AWS support a massive amount of daily internet activity for people all over the world, and though the services are generally stable, outages can happen.
So if —and more likely, when — outages happen, SafeOC and Cyber Safety Cop have shared some considerations to keep in mind.
SafeOC, part of the national “See Something, Say Something” anti-terrorism and public safety network, provides valuable advice to defend against malicious acts when the internet is working properly, and when it’s not.
Clayton Cranford is a retired Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputy and the founder of Cyber Safety Cop, also known as Total Safety Solutions. The consultancy provides knowledge and skills for parents, schools and businesses to navigate the ever-changing digital world. And it’s a lot more than the potential pitfalls of Facebook.
“We find ourselves talking about things that aren’t just kids on social media,” Cranford says.
His biggest advice in lieu of any Internet shutdown: Have a backup way to connect to the internet, and a way to access your important files.
A strong plan is to have an alternate internet source for when wi-fi is unavailable, Cranford noted. For many, that’s actually pretty simple: Tap into your cell phone data plan.
When your primary internet source of wi-fi or ethernet is down, use your cell phone’s data to continue working online. This usually means your device will need to be configured as a hotspot or tether, Cranford said. In effect, your cell phone will grab internet access from a cell phone tower and rebroadcast it as an accessible wi-fi signal like your normal router does.
That would allow you to maintain access to websites and important documents that are cloud-based.
Many computing services, sometimes automatically, store files on the cloud, including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and more, Cranford noted.
“We’re not really thinking about how those services are dependent on these cloud-based services,” he said. “A lot of times you don’t know they’re reliant on something like AWS. You start realizing that a lot of things we didn’t realize are interconnected to these cloud networks. If one goes down, a dominant one, it can affect everything.”
Backing up your files can feel old-fashioned, but it will save you in a pinch if you keep offline copies on your hard drives that will still be accessible if the web crashes.
“We’re recommending having local backups to important documents,” Cranford added, “not just having everything on the cloud.”
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