Spain has lived an unpublished fact in its history: a generalized blackout that affected the electricity supply of the entire Iberian Peninsula, including Portugal. As a collateral effect due to saturation, the mobile communications network also collapsed. This made the normal development of the working day impossible. So many companies ended up closing their doors.
The blackout that Spain has suffered has been a very extreme case, but teleworking and, above all, the distributed work has saved the furniture of those companies that did not have a staff structure based on workers residing in a single city, country and even continent.
While many companies They were forced at closing For not having electricity or access to the Internet, including those with remote employees, companies with remote workers distributed throughout the world demonstrated their resilience to any local incidence such as the one that left Spain in the dark. We have talked to two of those companies that could maintain their activity in Spain thanks to remote work distributed by different countries.
Distributed work and global blackout templates
One of the things that the proliferation of teleworking has taught us after the 2020 pandemic is that talent has no borders and, thanks to technology, someone in Bali could be teleworking for a Spanish company without any problem.
Some digital native companies such as Eventbrite, a platform for the sale of tickets and events, broke with their centralized organization following the pandemic, and chose to redesign their structure in a decentralized model based on small equipment distributed throughout the world, but mainly in the US, India and Spain.
Jaime Vallori, vice president of Eventbrite engineering assured that Thanks to that decentralized structureEventbrite continued to function normally while the blackout lasted. “We organize in teams (Squads) that are responsible for the maintenance of the detail pages of certain events. On Monday, the Squads of Spain is not that they could not do the maintenance of those events, they could not even know if something happened because they could not access,” Vallori told us.
Given such a stage, the rest of the teams located outside Spain took over from their teammates. “We activate a protocol so that the teams we have in the United States and India, proactively monitoring those areas that we covered from Spain, but obviously, could not be covered by our team,” said Eventbrite Engineering head in Spain.
Vallori stressed that the platform has an incident alert protocol that is automatically climbing to different equipment if it is not answered in a certain period of time.
“Since we are geographically distributed, throughout that protocol there is people from different areas of the world Until you get up at all. Therefore, although we had not given us time to activate that checkup (of local events) proactively, in the end through the scaling, it would have reached someone who could access and resolve the incidence, “Vallorí explained.
“Our customer service is also distributed between the United States and other countries,” says Vallori. Therefore, if someone with sufficient coverage in Spain would like to be attended by the company’s customer service could have done it because it remained active despite the fact that the development team in Spain was not operational.
Blablacar continued moving in the dark
Víctor Méndez, Vice President of Engineering of Blablacar, already told us the advantages of having a remote template distributed throughout different countries. Resilience to an event like the blackout that Spain has suffered is one that can add to its list.
Florent Bannwarth, Country Lead de Blablacar, lived in the first person the disconnection of your entire team of the company’s infrastructure. “We had time to see him come a little and notify France and other countries from which he was going to come to Spain. No one was going to be able to use the platform and we did not know when he was going to normalize again. So from France they could organize and gave us support,” Bannwarth recalled.
In addition to the shared car service, Blablacar also manages an international bus service, so it starts from France’s support was based on replacing the Spanish team in the management of those buses that came out of different parts of Spain. If not for them, This service would have stopped workingjust at the moment in which neither trains nor aircraft operated normally.
“The service worked without incident and we had an important peak of activity, especially between Barcelona and cities in southern France such as Perpignan and Toulouse, many passengers. At the last minute the only thing that worked was the bus,” said the head of the Blablacar team in Spain.
On the other hand, Blablacar’s distributed model allowed teams from other countries Maintain the operational platform in Spain In order not to register incidents once the service was restored, avoiding delays in its implementation as happened in the railway sector. “The next Tuesday was the day that the most reservations made in Blablacar in more than 15 years in Spain”, due to the need for urgent displacement of those who had stayed halfway to their destinations because of the blackout.
“Another advantage we had was that, part of the user service team that attends in Spanish, works from France and other countries,” although Spain’s staff of Spain was not operational, users who had coverage could solve their incidents normally.
In WorldOfSoftware | Companies that have eliminated teleworking are facing a big problem: they take longer to cover their vacancies
Imagen | UNSPLASH (Dmitry Grachyov)
