"We have seen from every major disruption like this an increase in the use of video conferencing," said Mr. Davis, who is based in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Yes, 100percentt up-time is probably impossible, but once a few people start noticing a service disruption like this, and the company talks about it, then there is a broader discussion to be had.
"Disruption," like so many buzzwords, is a programmed idiom.
"It could be that they have a ton of single parents and deploy regularly and can't afford to have disruptions like this," said Michelle M. Lindo McCluer, a former Air Force lawyer who is now director of the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit group in Washington.
Previously, if a disruption like the flu hit their household, they would be out of a job as a result of staying home to take care of their loved one.
In fact, however, banking was stabilized pretty quickly, and most measures of financial disruption look like this: That is, a period of severe disruption in 2008-9, but a return to relatively normal conditions thereafter.
In the most likely scenarios, climate change would cause some kind of regional or continental disruption, like a major crop failure; this disruption would cascade through the world's tightly connected economic and political systems to produce a global effect.
More likely: A law that would require refiners to maintain a five-day regional reserve of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel sufficient to maintain supplies in the face of disruptions like this summer's Gulf Coast hurricanes.
The regulators said that would make it easier to investigate market disruptions like the so-called flash crash this month that sent the Dow Jones industrials down nearly 1,000 points in less than 30 minutes.
Among them, he said, is likely to be a revised system of handling power disruptions like the one on Monday, in which "a lot of people at Con Ed didn't appear to know what they were doing".
