Some of our customers based in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia will likely have their businesses impacted in some way or another from the upcoming Hurricane Florence. We at Twisted Networx want to be as proactive as we can be addressing your needs. We too are located in what is estimated currently to be the primary path of the storm, so we're very well aware that our own infrastructure will likely be impacted as well.

We expect at some point, Mother Nature will reach out and impact one or more critical services, such as electrical power, internet, and possibly the water supply, either for some of our customers or for ourselves, or possibly both.

Computers and Servers: If you are not a customer with managed backup, we sincerely advise anyone in the projected path of the storm to have a full backup of your data as of end-of-business on Tuesday. Have a minimum of TWO backups. One should be stored off-site with you at a safe location. Another should be stored somewhere least likely to be impacted. If power goes out, you don't know how long it will be out, or how often it will come and go before things get better. If you at least have a backup of your data, whether you are our customer or not, we will do our best to help you get back on your feet after the storm. Please understand that existing customer relationships will take priority. Of those, medical and veterinary will take precedence, followed by financial-market customers.

If you ARE a customer with managed backup, we will be running integrity checks on all backups on Tuesday afternoon. If we need to spin up your backup data on a virtual appliance, we will work with you to do that until your normal systems can be restored.

VOIP Phone Systems: VoIP phone systems are internet-based, so if you lose internet, you will also lose phone service. There are a variety of ways to handle this scenario for our voice-over-IP customers.

  • Take your reception phones with you or send them home with staff that are out of the area of impact. Your IP phones will ring anywhere they can get on the internet, even at home, at another business, or across the planet. If you have a plan for providing customer service during an outage, incorporate your IP phones into your action plan. ( We specifically mention reception phones because those are the ones that most customers have ring on their main number, but you can take any/all of your phones with you. BE SURE YOU GET THE POWER ADAPTER if you're using POE phones currently. All our customers with IP phones have their power adapters located near their server closet in a box - unless your management has moved them.)
  • We can re-route your phone system to backup numbers for you remotely!
    If you don't want to mess with moving phones or are confused by the process, please simply do the following:

    • Send an email to support@twistednetworx.com. ( Do not text. Do Not Call. There is too much information we'll want to communicate that way.)
    • Tell us the main number (or numbers) you want us to redirect.
    • Tell us what mobile phone or landline you want us to redirect them to.
    • If you want to replace your standard greeting with an emergency greeting, simply include that greeting in the email you send (just type it out) and we will handle having your phone systems reprogrammed for you from the cloud. Feel free to pass on any custom information you want us to relay to your customers and we will be sure it gets done for you.
    • Be aware - if you re-route your phones to a mobile phone, in most instances that phone's voicemail will play to the customer who calls, so remember to update that person's voicemail. You don't want customers hearing "Hey, you've reached Jenny. I'm not home right now" when they call your forwarded line.
  • We can also simply re-route all calls to voicemail and notify customers of emergency conditions and you can get the audio message via email attachment. Then you can call them back at your discretion without having to tie up an employee's mobile phone.

Email Services:

Our email servers are rock-solid and geographically safe from this particular storm, so there is no direct threat to email systems at all forecasted at this time. And in the extremely unlikely event that there were a disruption, you can access all email through LiveArchive. All inbound mail will be queued and delivered when services are restored.

Staying In Contact:

All customers can reach us through email and most of you out there have my personal mobile number. The rest of our staff have been released to either work or take care of their families and loved ones as needed as of Monday night. If you have a quick question, you can text me, but if provider services go down, it's likely I won't be able to get them. Email however, will still be there and if for some reason we do lose communication via phone, we will endeavor to make email the primary communication method until services are restored.

The single best way to keep in touch during this kind of situation is through our Facebook page. If for some reason you've been hiding under a rock for the last eight years, our Facebook address is: https://www.facebook.com/twistednetworx

Government/Municipalities:

Downed lines, internet outages, provider outages, damaged infrastructure, and hundreds of other things can make communications in this kind of situation very difficult. Our current municipal customers are already aware of our response plans and know we are there for them. If you are in the surrounding area and need assistance, you can reach us via email or Facebook and we will do our absolute best to help you reestablish your communications infrastructure as quickly as possible. If situations become dire and you are communicating with the assistance of ARES or other emergency response teams, we will be monitoring the K40GB repeater in Albemarle, NC as well as the NCHEARS radio repeater system throughout the crisis. My call sign is KM4NHF. Any of your ARES or amateur radio team members will know how to best utilize that information to get in touch. For quick reference, pass on the following information to your radio operator and they can reach out direct:

  • K40GB: 146.985  -6 MHz,  Tone: 77.0/77.0
  • N4HRS: 444.900 +5 MHz, Tone: 110.9/110.9

Use of these bands to contact us during a crisis should be restricted to emergency requests only by licensed operators.

Final Words:

We will likely not be updating this page throughout the storm, but will instead be relying on Facebook and email for internet based communications with customers. Push come to shove, we will be helping out locally and keeping our own families safe during this potential crisis, so please bear with us if there are delays in responding. Please feel free to share this with all your staff members so they know how to reach us if they need us.