Monday morning around 11:30am, we began to hear that our people in Spain and Portugal were suddenly losing connectivity. Our Network Operations Centre quickly confirmed, this wasn’t a blip and it wasn’t just Colt. Both countries were facing widespread power outages impacting homes, offices, transport and people’s day-to-day lives.
As soon as the scale of the issue became clear, we moved fast and our robust Business Continuity process kicked in. Across teams, we aligned on a clear strategy and comms plan, making sure we stayed connected and responsive, even when entire regions had effectively gone dark.
One of the biggest challenges? Communicating with employees who were offline due to the power cuts. Some were even relying on old transistor radios to get updates! Despite that, we reached out where we could, checked in on wellbeing, and reassured teams they didn’t need to travel unless absolutely necessary.
Here’s the best part: every single tech location we own continued to perform exactly as it should. Our sites automatically switched to generator or battery support, keeping services stable. That’s a direct result of the hard work our teams put into proactive maintenance and planning for incidents just like this.
We kept a close eye on the situation as it evolved, mobilising field engineers and checking shared facilities, but the number of customer-related issues stayed low, with many of the issues a result of the power loss at customer sites rather than anything within our network.
It was also great to receive praise from customers impressed with our resilience, with one commenting that it’s times like these where you find out who’s properly investing in their infrastructure, and another praising our resilience and how it showed they’ve chosen the right partner.
Praise echoed by Tom Jennings, VP Operations at Colt: “I’m immensely proud of everyone involved and all those who immediately asked how they could help. The willingness to jump in and support shows exactly who we are. We’re making the extraordinary effortless for our customers.”
Looking ahead, we’re reinforcing our readiness across all countries, making sure that whether it’s extreme weather, a technical fault, or something else, we stay ready, just like we were this time.