On a related, but not quite COVID caused, note: I work IT for a company that has a sales office in Milan. We’ve been working this week to setup users for full teleworker capacity since the quarantine was announced.
Today, beginning around 2am MST one of the largest ISP in Italy, TIM (Telecom Italia), had a massive outage that took down external sites/services(anything located outside of the EU region) for most of Italy, but primarily Central and Northern Italy. The outage lasted all day. The single employee that was in the office had no connectivity to AWS, Adobe, among other sites/services including our central office in the states. The Milan teleworkers also had no connectivity outside of EU, including connectivity to our main site in the states.
#TIMdown was the second most trending topic on Twitter, behind the Coronavirus. I’m afraid with the quarantine and consequently the increased stress on local ISP in the region, this might expose deficiencies in the national infrastructure.
Some of the comments on the #TIMdown feed (Italian) are hilarious. Many people lamenting how the government had quarantined them, but they were unable to watch Netflix or play Xbox live games.
Something to consider if anything like their quarantine were to happen in the US.

