That Tuesday when our backup circuit actually saved a hospital floor

We had a scheduled maintenance window for a client in Columbus, cutting over to their secondary fiber while we swapped a switch. Everything looked clean on paper, but at 11:47 AM their primary circuit took a lightning hit near the building and dropped hard. The backup path we tested a week earlier held the link for 3 hours until the provider patched the fiber, and the only person who noticed was their network manager who emailed us a thumbs up. We always preach redundancy to customers, but that was the first time I saw it pay off in real time. Anyone else had a failover moment that made the extra monthly cost feel dumb at first but brilliant later?

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1 Comment

smith.blair15d ago

That line about the only person noticing being the network manager is wild. So nobody on the actual hospital floor saw a blip? Not even the heart monitors or the EMR system? Cause in my experience, nurses notice when a screen freezes for three seconds, let alone a full outage. Did you guys ever find out if the backup had a hidden hiccup that just happened to not bite you that day, or was it truly seamless? I always wonder about the failover tests we run versus the real ugly stuff, like a half fried port or a spanning tree loop that only shows up under stress.