One September morning we stopped existing on the internet, and it took us days to confirm we were really back.
Picture this: one ordinary day, with no warning, your business disappears from the internet. Not a slow website, not a broken layout on mobile. It stops existing, for anyone. Type your own address into a browser and you get nowhere, as if the name had never existed at all.
It wasn’t a viral marketing campaign that overwhelmed a server. It wasn’t a hack. It was something far more boring and far more common: a failure in the piece that lets the internet find your address, inside a domain account that had been running quietly for years, unchecked.
For several days, nobody could get through. It wasn’t the content, the design, or the server hosting the site — it was the address itself. And this happened to a company that has spent more than twenty years selling, of all things, connectivity.
The question no one asks
Who did this happen to? Us. Our own website, netteleco.es, stopped resolving for days in early September, along with another brand under the same roof.
Let me translate that: DNS is the internet’s phone book. When someone types in an address, something has to tell their browser where that website actually lives. If that phone book stops answering, it doesn’t matter how well-built your site is, how fast it loads, or how much you’ve invested in it — there’s physically no way to reach it.
It wasn’t WordPress. It wasn’t anything we had touched ourselves. It was a domain-level failure, the kind that almost never announces itself, because it has nothing to do with whether you’re doing your job well — it depends on a piece nobody remembers exists until it stops working.
Twenty years teaches you a lot, including this
Twenty years teaches you a lot, and one of the things it teaches you is the habit of believing that, with all your experience, this won’t happen to you. It happened to us, and we’re telling it exactly as it happened, because it’s precisely what we ask our own clients to keep an eye on.
While it was down, there was no way for a client to find us on Google, fill out a form, or verify anything from the outside. If we had depended on that website to take payments in real time, the way a shop depends on its card reader or a restaurant on its till, those days wouldn’t have been an inconvenience. They would have been money that never came in.
What changes when it happens to you, not a client
It’s easy to read this and think “my fiber is solid, this won’t happen to me.” The question was never whether your fiber is good. The real problem is that almost no business has a second way through if the first one fails — not to take payments, not to be found, not to tell anyone something’s wrong while it gets fixed.
What to ask before it happens to you
Four questions, no more, and none of them require buying anything today.
Would you know, within five minutes, who to call if your website or your main line stops working on a Saturday afternoon — or does it depend on one specific person being reachable that day?
What would happen to your payments if your main connection drops while you have customers in front of you? Is there a backup line that kicks in on its own, or does everything run through a single fiber connection?
Who manages your domain and your hosting, and do you actually know, or does only whoever set it up years ago know?
If you ask your provider today, “if this goes down, how fast will you tell me, and how fast will you fix it?” — do they have a clear answer, or an uncomfortable silence?
If any of these four leaves you without an answer, that’s where to start — not with us, with the question itself.
With twenty years in this business, it took us longer than we’d like to admit to confirm we were truly back online. We’re telling this story not to look good, but because next time something like this happens, we’d rather it be an anecdote you tell at a meeting than a Saturday you never get back.
If you’d like to walk through what would happen to your business if your main connection failed on an ordinary day, at Netteleco we’ve spent twenty years looking at exactly these blind spots. Get in touch.
