When the Email Goes Down: Why Government Agencies Need a Communication Backup That Actually Works
Every government agency has a business continuity plan. Most of those plans include a section on communication. That section typically lists email as the primary channel, with phone calls as a fallback, and perhaps a general-purpose messaging app as a last resort. Then a cyberattack happens, and the plan meets reality. Email servers go offline. VPNs become unreachable. The messaging app the team has been using informally turns out to require the same compromised network infrastructure to function. The phone tree works for individual calls but falls apart for coordinating ten departments simultaneously during an active incident. Decision-makers cannot reach each other. Documents cannot be shared securely. The agencies responsible for responding to the attack are themselves unable to communicate. This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is a documented failure mode that has played out in real incidents across government infrastructure globally, and the frequency of such attacks on p...