Update 14th January 2021: Extract from report from the CEO to the Board

We (LINX) continue to monitor our staff and their overall well-being as well as our operational access to facilities that host our equipment that in turn provide our network services. The senior management team, along with our risk, HR and business continuity planners meet twice weekly to review and access staff availability and our ability to meet operational needs.

As well as having a 24/7 first line, network operation centre (NOC) to provide operational support services, we maintain a tiered level of engineering support, with rotas covering tier 2 engineering to further support our first line NOC and tier 3 expertise for matters that need escalation. Tier 2, and 3 engineers mainly cover planning and project work that under direction can revert to operational needs given any sustained and substantial absentees due to illness and specifically COVID-19. However, it should also be noted that any significant change in our ability to manage operations would be communicated to our members and partners proactively.

We (LINX) operate a flexible working policy and our staff are currently home based, with sufficient equipment and IT services to maintain a full 24/7 operation, as we have been doing since March 2020. In that, it means we maintain a 24/7 network operations coverage and  helps to mitigate the risk of groups of staff contracting COVID-19 simultaneously and  hence limits the staff unavailability rate.

Kurtis Lindqvist

CEO

25th March 2020 – Message to members from the CEO

Dear all,

Just a brief update on Coronavirus response and business continuity at LINX.

You will have seen from my previous message that everyone is now working from home. Fortunately, LINX is in an excellent position to maintain critical service and can continue to develop the business in these circumstances. That said, of course these are not an ideal working conditions, and we want to limit staff’s visits and travel to data centres to the bare minimum. We have therefor decided to prioritise member facing services over internal improvement projects.

We are particularly focused on ensuring we can fulfill additional port provisioning orders, which are coming in at an accelerated rate.

Our capacity remains strong. Yesterday we touched 5Tbps total aggregate traffic across our various peering LANs for the first time. We remain confident we can continue to meet your traffic demands.

You will also have seen Jen’s message yesterday about moving LINX109 to a videoconference format. I do hope you will attend, and vote.

We will update you further when we have more information or if circumstances change.

Best Regards,

Kurtis Lindqvist

CEO

20th March 2020

This is a brief statement updating you on LINX’s Covid-19 response.

We previously mentioned that our business continuity response plans include plans for escalating measures we can take to protect our staff and the continuity of service.

We have now taken the decision to move the NOC to work-from-home status, effective from the shift handover at 07:30 on Friday 20th March. They will continue to operate a 24×7 NOC support service. We are extremely grateful to our dedicated staff for being able to continue this during these challenging circumstances.

13th March 2020

The first thing we would like to stress is that we are confident in our ability to maintain continuity of service on our peering LANs.

Our business continuity plan includes specific plans in relation to pandemic risk, which have recently been reviewed and updated. Our response plans include an escalating series of measures we can take to mitigate risks to staff members and others, and risks to the continuity of IXP operations, as the situation requires.

Some of the specific responses we have already taken include:

• Last week, we decided to cancel all non-essential international travel for staff until further notice. In practice, many of the conferences we would have expected to attend had already been cancelled, suspended, or transformed to video participation only by the organisers, or have been since we took that decision.
• This week, we implemented a new work-from-home policy for staff, under which staff are asked to work remotely unless there is a valid or required reason to attend our premises in person. This supports “social-distancing” but is not intended to achieve full isolation; we have scope to further reduce travel to premises or meeting in person as the situation demands. At this time, the NOC will continue to operate 24×7 from on the premises.
• Any staff who have traveled to high-risk regions have been asked to self-isolate for a period. This is more strict than the above, meaning they must not attend LINX premises for any reason. This would also apply to any staff who develop symptoms consistent with Covid-19, or who live with others who do.
• All teams have been asked to review their preparations for staff cover in case they experience a high level of absence due to illness.

We are keeping the situation under close review as it develops.

LINX109 is currently scheduled for 5^th & 6^th May. We intend to decide next week whether it goes ahead as an in-person meeting, becomes a remote-participation meeting, or is re-scheduled.

We are confident that through our ordinarily resilience and planned responses we will be able to maintain continuity of service for traffic on our Internet exchanges, even if the situation worsens significantly.

Especially in the light of some ill-informed media speculation about Internet performance, we don’t want to be seen as trying to take advantage of the situation for sales purposes. That said, for any LINX members who are reviewing their capacity needs as part of their own pandemic preparedness, and who wish to discuss additional capacity requirements, we are ready to support you as normal: please contact sales@linx.net or your usual account manager.

We are publishing this statement on our website at https://www.linx.net/linx-response-to-covid-19-coronavirus-threat/. We will use that page to publish any updates to our formal response to enquiries about our response to Covid-19.

4th March 2020