đź“Ť The Situation
A phishing attack against another brand in our enterprise brought down multiple shared systems—taking our public websites and intranet offline overnight. Our properties weren’t deemed critical, so we were left without a clear recovery path and no timeline for restoration.
Rather than wait in line, I started looking for a workaround.
đź› My Role
I wasn’t the one restoring servers—but I was the one who made restoration happen for us.
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I dug through org charts and pinged anyone who might have insight, eventually connecting with the Head of Cloud Applications, who allowed one of his engineers to spin up temporary hosting environments.
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I partnered with the cloud architect to configure the setup and coordinate the migration of our outdated WordPress environments into a secure, modern AWS cloud structure.
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While infrastructure testing and restoration was underway, I focused on the content layer—ensuring messaging, menus, forms, and visual components were restored and accurate.
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On the internal side, I worked with corporate communications to sustain employee messaging through alternate platforms during the outage.
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Externally, I took special care with our social media presence—I’m the sole owner of our candidate-facing channels, and during the blackout, I carefully crafted posts that acknowledged the disruption without raising alarm. We maintained our employer brand and candidate engagement even while our digital front door was technically closed.
🚧 The Challenges
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No ownership structure: Our sites had no designated recovery lead
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Deprioritized: We were considered “non-essential” in a broader queue
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Outdated infrastructure: Pre-migration environments hadn’t been versioned or updated in years
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Brand risk: Going dark on social could raise red flags with prospective candidates
âś… Results
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Successfully restored all digital properties before our “official” ticket was addressed
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Migrated to a more modern, secure, and cost-effective cloud environment
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Maintained candidate engagement via social despite the outage
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Built long-term safeguards, including a secure fallback staff portal embedded on our external site, in case future incidents cut off internal tools
🪞 Looking Back
I didn’t write the code. I didn’t provision the servers. But I was the one who connected the dots between confusion and clarity. I pushed the right people to act, partnered with the ones who could, and kept the messaging clean and steady—internally and externally—through a time of complete disruption.
This one wasn’t about glory. It was about grit.