The day our entire system went down because someone kicked a fiber patch cable

Last Tuesday I watched a cleaning guy trip over a barely taped-down patch cable in our server room. Took down all 47 offices in the building for 2 hours. My boss asked why we don't have redundancy on that link and I just pointed at the budget spreadsheet from last quarter. Anyone else deal with management that refuses to spend money on basic infrastructure until after a disaster?

2 comments

2 Comments

sarahsullivan10d ago

Didn't some IT group publish a survey showing most outages come from cheap fixes failing?

hernandez.ben11d ago

Look that sucks and I get being frustrated. But honestly, I kinda see this from management's side too. You had a single patch cable taped down in a server room running 47 offices. That's a single point of failure begging to happen. The real question is why wasn't that cable properly protected or run in a conduit in the first place. Blaming the cleaning guy for tripping on it feels like missing the bigger problem. Sometimes the budget denial is really about them not trusting your risk assessment, not about them being cheap.