IT sector cancels client meetings, shifts to work-from-home mode
Times of India | 20 July 2024
Kolkata: Samantak Banerjee, who works at the Unitech building in New Town for a global IT firm, reported to the office around 10 am. By then, about 90% of his team members — whose client is an European bank — had opted to go back home and work in WFH mode. “They left the office by 1 pm,” he said.
A few kilometres away in Salt Lake, Shruti Banerjee was a bit surprised when her boss asked her to concentrate on getting her “long due” HR formalities completed in the company’s internal system.She later came to know that there was a Microsoft outage that led her to cancel three client meetings that were to take stock of the week’s work. “I just could not open my laptop. I took a coffee break but my colleagues said the situation was not improving. While normal work resumed only in the second half, I am happy that some long pending internal work could be completed,” said Banerjee.
Work in several IT firms operating in Sector V and New Town were severely disrupted due to the outage that occurred on Friday morning. Companies, which mostly operate on Microsoft and client-based services, were badly affected.
Aman Shaw, quality analyst of Teoco, provider of analytics and organisational solutions to communication service providers, said, “The blue screen of death error that caused the system to shut down and restart suddenly affected the work of employees in several companies, banks and govt offices.”
“We took breaks. We are worried that we will be asked to join duty on Saturday,” said Aneek Dasgupta, who works at a firm in Unitech.
Companies who operate on their own system continued to work but most client interfaces which depend on Microsoft systems were hit. “The outage started around 10 am. The system was either completely down or very slow,” said Kaustav Dey of another IT company.
Some firms, though, managed to find some quick solutions. Abhishek Rungta, founder and CEO of Indus Net Technologies, said, “We configured disaster recovery for a few of our clients on alternative cloud services.” “Many firms were facing disruptions as IT and ITes related services were majorly hit,” said Sector V Stakeholders’ Association vice president Kalyan Kar.