Do you have to make time if you WFH and internet goes?

[Thewheelweavesasthewheelwills]

When I worked in an office if the internet went it was the up to the company to sort it out and we were not obliged to catch up time.

I now WFH and my internet went yesterday. I was wondering is that my issue or the companies issue time wise? I would think it is the employees issue and up to them to make up time. My way of getting to work now is via the internet so I need to have a good connection, same as my car needed to work to get to the office. In both situations you'd expect your employer to be understanding if there was an issue

I wasn't offline for long and worked a bit through my lunch.

I've had to use my hotspot as wifi is still down today but hopefully should be sorted soon!

YABU - not up to the employee to make up time
YANBU - It is up to the employee

I have to go into the office.

I wouldn’t make the time up, just as I wouldn’t in the office. Even if you’re offline you can do work like to do lists, delete old outlook emails and saved files, call colleagues in the phone for catch ups etc.

We don’t have enough desks at work for everyone so I’m my situation I have to work from home some days anyway.

In my company it depends if it is becoming an issue. As a one off I wouldn’t be expected to give the time back. If it was a weekly thing it would then be something for me to sort.

I use a hotspot, go to a friend's with my laptop or pay to work in one of those co-working hubs.

I don't know what our policy is, but I usually download reading material to read later, so I would just switch to that. Plus much of my work is creating campaigns or writing presentation or content for our web site and I can do that without internet.

Harder to do if you work for public sector and aren't allowed to store things locally.

It's a risk with any job that requires an internet connection, and it's something employers and employees shoulder equally. I WFH and whenever my fibre connection goes down, I switch it over to the 4G hub. The bandwidth is rubbish and it means I can't do my job fully, but I can still do smaller things until the issue(s) is fixed. I have fibre, so it's quite the change from almost a gigabit to 20MB down and less than a MB up. Luckily it doesn't go down that often.

If WFH it’s my responsibility to have reliable wifi. If short break (couple of hours) I would not make up - if longer would head to office nearby. Obs not everyone has that option.

We're provided with a router that accesses by satellite. If that goes down we can be asked to go into the office in some circumstances. We're not expected to make any time up

I have had this happen twice in the last couple of months. The first time it was about an hour from the end of the day so I did what I could offline then finished half an hour early. The second time was a planned outage so I went to a library and worked there for the morning.

I once attended a meeting sitting in my car outside the library! Thankfully my laptop battery held out...

We all either have a smart phone provided by work, or software on our personal phones (we can choose which we prefer) so most people can, if their internet goes down, use a phone as a temporary hotspot. If not, at the very least, they'd have access on their phone to email, Teams and most documents, so they'd be able to get some stuff done, if not everything.

However, we have a hybrid working model so most people do live within reasonable commuting distance of the office, and if they were likely to be without wifi for longer than a day they'd need to either a) agree some tasks with their boss that they could do without internet access, b) take annual leave or c) come into the office and work from there.

Obviously option A would be dependent on the kind of job you have or what you were working on. I would typically have some tasks to do that wouldn't require internet access - in fact, some of my work is actually easier to do without internet access, as no internet means fewer interruptions and notifications. But that wouldn't be the case for everyone.