What to Do When Online Outages Hit Your Events

Attendees to Hubspot’s online Grow networking conference got a rude surprise last week when some of them found themselves temporarily unable to access the event’s sessions. The conference was hit by an internet service disruption from the content delivery network Fastly that affected some of the biggest sites on the internet.

While the problem was quickly identified and dealt with, it’s a reminder of how vulnerable the tech infrastructure that events rely on can be. As key internet infrastructure becomes concentrated in the hands of a few companies, service disruptions become more and more likely. Given that last Tuesday’s outage was only the most recent in a series of such events over the past few years, what kind of contingency plans should eventprofs have in place for when the technology they depend on fails?