How do you deal with bosses demanding fixes for third-party outages?
Non-technical executives often refuse to accept external outages, demanding that IT staff personally call providers or connect them with high-level corporate executives to fast-track a fix. This forces workers to repeatedly field unrealistic demands and justify why cheap plans or massive software failures cannot be instantly resolved.
Core Friction Pattern
Analysis of 4 peer accounts across online developer and community forums reveals that “How do you deal with bosses demanding fixes for third-party outages?” repeatedly surfaces due to edge-case mismatches between standard defaults and real-world environments. Standard troubleshooting frequently falls short, compelling practitioners to develop custom workarounds.
+2 alternative community-tested workarounds cataloged below.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
How do you deal with bosses demanding fixes for third-party outages?
- 1Explaining contract service level agreements and small business pricing tier limitationsDid this help you?
- 2Faking being on hold or on the phone with support to appease managementDid this help you?
- 3Venting with peers and using humor about unrealistic leadership expectationsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I’ve been asked that question at least 3 or 4 times this morning, despite it literally being front page news, someone obviously thinks all I need to do it put a ticket in or call them to fix the problem.”source ↗
“Two jobs ago, I worked at a company of 25 employees. There was a major Comcast outage. My boss told me to call them and tell them that "the CEO is very upset."”source ↗
“Yeah we had a two day Internet outage and I tried explaining that our $100/mo plan doesn't entitle us to a 3 hour resolution time SLA.”source ↗
“Around 10 years ago we had an O365 outage that left us with nothing to do but sit around and wait. Our CEO found this level of helplessness unacceptable and came up with a brilliant solution: he literally asked us to put him on the phone with Microsoft CEO or any higher level executive.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 42Why are teachers expected to be available 24/7?
- 90HubSpot is down and timing out right now
- 7Is it normal for service plumbers to work 12 hour days?
- 2Why is my entire day eaten up by meetings and micromanagement?
- 27How to handle too much work without project engineers or coordinators
- 7Why do yearly workloads hit all at once?