So I said something on the Fediverse:

Current status: it's all fun and games until the building's backbone router disappears.

A modest suggestion: obtain problem reporting/emergency contact numbers for your upstream in advance and post them on the wall somewhere. But you're on your own if you use VOIP desk phones.

(It's back now or I wouldn't be posting this, I'm in the office today. But it was an exciting 20 minutes.)

(I was somewhat modeling the modest suggestion after nuintari's Fediverse series of "rules of networking", eg, also.)

The disappearance of the building's backbone router took out all local networking in the particular building that this happened in (which is the building with our machine room), including the university wireless in the building. THe disappearance of the wireless was especially surprising, because the wireless SSID disappeared entirely.

(My assumption is that the university's enterprise wireless access points stopped advertising the SSID when they lost some sort of management connection to their control plane.)

In a lot of organizations you might have been able to relatively easily find the necessary information even with this happening. For example, people might have smartphones with data plans and laptops that they could tether to the smartphones, and then use this to get access to things like the university directory, the university's problem reporting system, and so on. For various reasons, we didn't really have any of this available, which left us somewhat at a loss when the external networking evaporated. Ironically we'd just managed to finally find some phone numbers and get in touch with people when things came back.

(One bit of good news is that our large scale alert system worked great to avoid flooding us with internal alert emails. My personal alert monitoring (also) did get rather noisy, but that also let me see right away how bad it was.)

Of course there's always things you could do to prepare, much like there are often too many obvious problems to keep track of them all. But in the spirit of not stubbing our toes on the same problem a second time, I suspect we'll do something to keep some problem reporting and contact numbers around and available.