Reflections on the 2020 Nashville Christmas Day bombing

Abstract

On Christmas Day, 2020, the detonation of an explosive device in Nashville, Tennessee resulted in many thousands of homes and businesses losing access to telecommunications services. While pre-established business continuity and disaster recovery plans helped many businesses and organisations recover from the impact and outages, many still suffered extended downtimes due to the lack of redundancies in place. Indeed, for organisations without a backup telecommunication provider, the effect of the bombing was dramatic, with hospitals, urgent care facilities, restaurants and other businesses all suffering major disruption. This paper examines how the various organisations responded and recovered from the incident, and considers whether legislation is required to ensure that telecommunications providers have sufficient redundancies in place to avoid such extended outages from happening again.