Under Pressure: How Network Performance Takes A Mental Toll on IT

In our increasingly connected world, network slowdowns and outages can cripple a business. Outages hit organisations’ operations, reputation and profits, and the pressure to get the online wheels turning again is immense. The stress falls squarely on IT teams, and the impact on individuals’ mental health can be brutal. Companies must offer better support to teams that may be stretched thin even before an outage strikes.

Downtime can be catastrophic

No one is safe from network outages. Apple, the BBC, Coinbase and Reddit have all suffered in recent years. In October 2021, a seven-hour outage cost Facebook $100 million. Two months later, Amazon was out of action for hours, leaving customers unable to operate their networked fridges, doorbells, and speakers, and leaving thousands of robot vacuum cleaners to twiddle their smart thumbs.

Network outages can result from power failure, network congestion, cyberattacks, human error or configuration issues. They may be widespread (like the March DNS incident that saw 15,000 Australian websites taken offline) or specific to your organisation. Either way, they’re expensive, costing larger corporations an average of $144,000 per hour in revenue loss, and smaller organisations (those with fewer than 20,000 employees) $2,000 per hour.

Cost of downtime is rising year on year. Lost revenue, reduced productivity, customer complaints, regulatory issues and reputational damage can all throw your organisation into a tailspin. A blocker to one process can ripple right through your organisation, leaving staff baffled and senior executives fuming. And panicked stakeholders will be looking in one direction for resolution: the IT team.

Network teams are already feeling the strain

The pressure to get networks running again as your organisation haemorrhages money would be bad enough if it landed on an empty to-do list. But many IT teams are already overworked, under-resourced, and plagued by employee churn. Workers may be expected to deal with tickets at pace while procuring hardware and software, helping less technically minded staff, and advising on new technologies.

That pressure has been exacerbated by rising cybercrime and new COVID protocols, while the rise in remote work demands more bandwidth from IT infrastructure and the expectation of timely troubleshooting. Outage emergencies put the heat on people who may already be near boiling point.

Network outages pile on the pressure

Network outages can hammer your organisation’s bottom line commercially, but there will be a psychological impact for many workers, too. Internet addiction is recognised as a condition by the World Health Organisation, and for many of us being deprived of the internet feels deeply personal, more like losing a limb than having a tech problem. Being cut off from networks, key projects and messaging services can be deeply frustrating for employees. That great wave of emotion comes crashing down just as IT workers need to be at their most focused and methodical.

Network outages will generally mean team members being pulled out of key tasks, many of which are time-sensitive. Forget that once-urgent project, remote work or project visibility: even employers who are sympathetic to a work-life balance will crack the whip. Network engineers may need to travel to remote sites, expose themselves to COVID risks or spend long hours desperately tracing the problem while the clock ticks and panicked communications rain down from executives. Unfortunately, at this stage, it’s not just about fixing the technical problems: stakeholder management becomes a major factor. Individuals whose attention to detail and concentration makes them relish coding projects may suddenly be roped into a high-pressure environment that not only requires a quick technical response but also needs diplomacy and the ability to manage stakeholder expectations.

Recovery may be complex and frustrating

Network outages may be relatively short-lived, especially if you have a viable secondary connection. But all too often, recovery is complex and frustrating.

A single failure may trigger multiple issues, affecting different offices, partner organisations, and online portals in different ways. For network teams, that means reviewing everything from IoT endpoints to data packets and cloud-service infrastructure to trace the source of the problem. Outages can also result from cyber-attacks, operation errors, surges, network congestion, loose connections, or cables damaged by fire or water.

Teams may find themselves scrambling through dashboards and logs to get a holistic picture. Systems may need to be rebooted remotely. Weighing up possible causes and results of corrective action is hard at the best of times and is even harder while the business breathes down your neck. Without clear guidance, staff may use unsecured public wi-fi or shadow IT to keep projects on track, exposing data to theft and opening up your network to malware attacks—and the risk of further outages—further down the track.

Network outages can have a profound mental health impact