This week is shaping up to be another awful one for UK technology services. First the O2 network disappeared, then the BBC went AWOL, and now the Lloyds TSB online banking site's gone dark. More to the point, how strong is your disaster-recovery plan?
The O2 mobile network is now back on its feet after a day or so of staggering about. The unofficial whisper is that a change of authorisation database caused the problem.
Aunty Beeb lost connectivity to both its data centres on Wednesday, thanks to a failure of load-balancing kit.
And now we hear that Lloyds suffered a "service interruption" for more than an hour yesterday.
And all this, of course, comes after last month's RBS/NatWest turmoil.
Look, this isn't about pointing the finger at unfortunate IT people and laughing at their supposed incompetence. In a work of complex networks with their inherent legacy components, these things are practically guaranteed to happen. It's just a matter of time.
So who's next? Could it be you?
Yes, it could happen to anyone. It's not a question of how confident you are that your infrastructure is reliable. No, it's more a question of how confident you are that your disaster-recovery plan will work, and work quickly.
Richi Jennings 
, editor of Input Output UK, is also an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won ASBPE and Neal awards. You can encircle him at +richi, follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
