Commentary: Hit by recent tech outages? Here's why you should always have a Plan B

I always carry at least S$50 in cash when I am out of the house. I also keep some cash in my bedroom and in my car.

I am not old-fashioned, but as a geek who has worked in the IT industry for 15 years, I am well aware of the many ways technology can fail us.

On the afternoon of Oct 14, DBS and Citibank customers found themselves unable to use their ATM cards, credit cards, digital payment apps and online banking services.

An outage at a major data centre made it impossible for thousands of people to buy goods, transfer money and carry out other digital banking transactions.

It took over nine hours for services to be restored. This digital outage likely disrupted many people's weekend plans. The Monetary Authority of Singapore said: “Customers can benefit from having alternative payment providers and carrying some cash as a contingency.”

For many of us who do not realise how overly reliant we have become on mobile devices and services, this incident is a wake-up call.

Let’s look at the key digital tools we use and how we can mitigate the risk of failure:

SMARTPHONES

Today, our phones are our lifelines. We use them to pay for goods and services, take public transport, enjoy entertainment, authenticate our identities, snap photos, message friends and, oh yes, make the occasional phone call.

The convenience is great when you only need one device to get everything done. This is the stuff of 20th-century science fiction.

However, our phones become a single point of failure when something goes wrong with the device or the infrastructure that enables mobile apps to work.

Let’s say your phone suddenly dies from a heavy knock or is dropped into a puddle of water.

What would happen to your thousands of photos, videos and messages?

Most of us use cloud backup services like iCloud (Apple devices) or Google Photos (Android devices). But cloud services may fail or run out of space.

DO THIS: Always make a local backup of your phone’s content. Save your photos and videos to your home computer or on an external storage drive. I am paranoid about losing my data, so I have two separate backups of my phone’s data, as well as that of my entire family. It is also best to do a fresh backup every six months or so.   

LAPTOPS

Have you ever had your laptop crash on you during a Zoom conference call?

At best, it is an embarrassing technical error. At worst, it could cost you an important business deal if you cannot get back into the call to present your pitch deck.

I know a tuition teacher who was having issues with his laptop webcam, and this was extremely disruptive for his online classes.

He sent his laptop in for repair, which took an entire week. When he collected his laptop, the webcam malfunctioned again.

In the post-pandemic era, having a properly working laptop is critical for many job roles. Laptops have complicated innards, and any component can malfunction at any time. 

DO THIS: Do not discard old laptops if they are still working. Keep them as a backup device. For important business or school presentations, always bring two laptops in case one fails. Always back up the data on your laptops to an external drive. And never drop your laptop onto the ground — you are bound to damage one of the many sensitive components inside.

CLOUD-CONNECTED DEVICES

It is not just our devices that we depend on.

We are also reliant on the invisible Wi-Fi signals around us that connect us to many Internet services. Such online services reside in the “cloud” – a complex web of data centres, software, algorithms and other technologies.

These days, we have many different cloud-connected devices such as printers, kitchen appliances and smart displays. A break in the Internet connection will mean these devices get instantly crippled.  

A few years ago, I organised a brainstorming session with my colleagues. I wanted us to write our comments on a shared online document, but the Internet connection suddenly slowed to a crawl.

No problem, I thought to myself, I can get the document printed out for everyone. 

I walked over to the office printer, but was quickly stumped. I couldn’t get anything printed because the cloud-connected printer could not receive my document file over Wi-Fi.

DO THIS: Before you buy any cloud-connected device, check if it can work without an Internet connection. For example, does your printer have a physical USB port so you can do wired printing if wireless printing fails? 

DIGITAL PURCHASES

Another often-overlooked vulnerability is in our digital purchases. We buy digital content online, but they only exist as long as they are kept alive on data centres.

In contrast, if you buy a physical book or music CD, they can remain on your shelf long after you are dead. 

Take for example the Amazon Kindle, probably the most popular e-book reader in the world.

Kindle users in China received a rude shock when Amazon announced that it would shutter the Kindle e-book store on June 30 this year. Users were given a year until June 2024 to download their previously purchased e-books.

If users did not download the e-books to their Kindle device after the deadline, they would never see those e-books again.

This is the ever-present risk when you buy content such as books, movies, games, and music online: Nobody can guarantee that the purchased content will be available to you for the rest of your life. The content resides on data servers which will be shut down if the content provider goes bust.   

DO THIS: Instead of buying digital content, consider subscription services like Spotify or Microsoft Game Pass where you trade ownership for convenience. If the subscription service goes away, you won’t feel that your purchases have gone up in smoke. And if you do purchase content online, make sure you download the content and back it up.  

Also, try to shop smart. I buy Amazon Kindle e-books regularly, but only if they are on discount. I have a few hundred e-books in my Kindle library, most of them bought for just a few dollars when they were heavily discounted.

This way, if Amazon ever goes away, I won’t feel that much pain for the e-books that I can no longer download.

The technologies we use in our day-to-day lives are incredibly useful, convenient, and powerful. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these devices and apps can fail at any moment.

While we cannot predict when a failure will occur, we should always have a Plan B to minimise the fallout.

At the very least, always be sure to back up your data — twice if possible!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ian YH Tan is a lecturer in strategic communications at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. He has more than two decades of experience in journalism, marketing, public relations, and business management. He has worked in Microsoft, Lenovo, Razer and Singapore Press Holdings. He is also a lifelong geek who assembles his own desktop computers for gaming and Generative AI use.