Today, many of us woke up to the news that a mass IT outage caused chaos all over the world. An update to Cyber-security firm Crowdstrike’s Falcon antivirus software caused a significant number of Microsoft devices to become stuck in a boot loop. This has disrupted everything from your local GP or veterinarian to the Mercedes AMG Formula 1 team and grounded flights all over the USA.
It sort-of like Y2K actually happened, but with another name: patchpocalypse.
The thing is, these unpredictable, emergent events (also defined as Black Swan events) do happen from time-to-time, and communicating with your customer base about disruptions or changes is one of the first steps you can take if your business has been affected by outages outside your control.
Our experience with the Outbreak of COVID-19, and the death of Queen Elizabeth II taught us that when these events happen, lots of people approach us all at once to make changes to their websites and create site-wide notifications alerting customers of the nature of the disruption and what to do as a result.
A lot of really big companies are slow to update customers in the event of disruption. This is why we developed a standard feature of all new sites we create – the site-wide notification. It’s a simple switch in the site settings that allows a site owner to define and activate a message that will appear across the entire website, and link to a key page that explains further.
We do this so that, when these events occur, we aren’t the bottleneck in a time-sensitive situation. Our clients can make changes to their site quickly and easily.
If you’re interested in making changes to your site that would allow site-wide notifications, or are interested in a new website that has this sort of thought put into all its elements, please do get in touch – we’d be delighted to help.
