The British media was ablaze with rumours, every journalist ready to write the ‘offshoring leads to critical damage to British business’ headlines. Only one problem – British business was pretty much unaffected. Only the Daily Mail could muster any kind of story out of it – ‘Indian call centres for British firms ‘badly hit’ after two severed undersea cables knock out internet’. Even that story could not claim that British businesses were seriously affected, or even which companies they were!

Outsourced business processes would suffer if disaster recovery was not built into the outsourcing contracts, but it is standard best practice when using call centres to have provision for this sort of event. Service providers’ traffic should automatically switch over voice and internet traffic to networks from other service providers in the eventuality that service is lost. To plan, disaster recovery has been effective and outsourcing and offshoring has been spared the negative headlines.