Nothing is loading, the phones are ringing and everyone is looking at you. The five checks below take about three minutes and they tell us more than an hour of guessing. Do them, then call.

Try this first

1. Is it everyone, or one person? Ask two other people to try the same thing. One person affected is a computer problem. Everyone affected is a shared system - internet, server, or an online service - and that changes who looks at it and how fast.
2. Is the internet up? Take your mobile phone, turn Wi-Fi off so it uses mobile data, and open a website you do not normally visit. If it loads on mobile data but nothing works on the office Wi-Fi, the problem is your office internet or the equipment in your comms cupboard, not the websites.
3. Is it one system or all of them? Try three different things: a website, your email, and the system you use for work such as your accounting or job management software. If email is down but websites load, it is email. If everything is down, it is the connection.
4. Has there been a power event? A flicker, a blackout overnight, a tripped safety switch, someone working on the building, a cleaner unplugging something. Equipment often comes back up in the wrong order after power returns and needs a hand. Check whether the lights are on in the comms cupboard or wherever the internet equipment lives.
5. Call us on 03 9028 4358. Do not email. If your internet or your mail system is the thing that has failed, your email will not reach us, and you will spend twenty minutes waiting on a reply that was never sent.

What to have ready when you call

• What time it started, and what was happening just before.
• How many people are affected, and whether anyone is unaffected.
• The answers to the checks above - especially the mobile data test.
• Whether anything changed yesterday: new equipment, a power outage, a builder onsite, a software update.
• A number we can reach you on that does not depend on your office systems, usually a mobile.

What not to do

• Do not have five people log five tickets. Nominate one person to talk to us. Everything else creates duplicates that have to be untangled while the clock runs.
• Do not turn the server off and on. A server that is shut down badly can take far longer to come back, and can lose data that was in the middle of being written.
• Do not start unplugging cables in the comms cupboard to see what happens. If something is already unplugged or hanging loose, tell us rather than pushing it back in.
• Do not let anyone "have a quick look" who is not meant to. Well-meant changes made during an outage are the hardest thing to unpick afterwards.

Keeping the business moving while we work

An outage does not have to mean everyone sits still.

• Phones on mobile data still get email if your mail is in the cloud.
• One phone can be set as a hotspot for a laptop so one person can keep processing urgent work. Ask us and we will talk whoever needs it through the setting.
• Write down anything you would normally enter into a system - orders, times, deliveries - on paper as you go. Catching up later is straightforward. Reconstructing a morning from memory is not.

Why this happens

Most whole-business outages come down to one of three things: the internet service itself, the equipment that connects your office to it, or one shared system having a bad day at the provider's end. The checks above separate those three quickly, which is why we ask for them before anything else.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.