Freelancing Through a Blackout: A Firsthand Account
Earlier in this series
Most of what I write in this series is analytical. This piece is personal, because I think the analytical pieces earn more trust when I show where they come from.
I run an independent security consulting practice. My clients are in Iran and abroad. And I have kept that practice running through national-scale internet shutdowns that lasted months at a stretch — periods when the connectivity my entire profession assumes simply was not there. I wrote about the governance dimension in When the Internet Goes Dark and the institutional aftermath in Rebuilding Digital Trust After a National Shutdown. This is the view from a desk: one consultant, a client list, and no internet.
I am not going to discuss politics here, and I am not going to describe technical workarounds in any detail that could put anyone at risk. This is about work — how a knowledge business survives when its central utility disappears — and what I would tell any freelancer who might one day face the same thing.
The first lesson: the panic is professional, not technical
The first days of a long outage are not mostly about the technology. They are about your standing with clients. A consultant's entire value rests on reliability. When you go silent mid-engagement, the client does not know if you are gone for a day or forever. Every hour of unexplained silence spends reputation you may have taken years to build.
So the first survival skill is brutally simple: never let silence be the message. Whatever thin channel still exists — and in a long disruption, something intermittent usually does — its first use is not for delivering work. It is for one short message: I am fine, the work is safe, here is when you will next hear from me. That message costs almost nothing to send and is worth more than any deliverable that week.
Preparing before, because during is too late
After the first long shutdown, I rebuilt my practice around one assumption: connectivity is a resource that can vanish. That changed how I structure engagements before anything goes wrong.
- Expectations are set in the contract, not in the crisis. My engagements now acknowledge, in plain language, that connectivity disruptions happen where I work, and they define what happens when they do: deadlines shift, work continues offline, communication resumes on a stated rhythm. Clients respect this far more than I feared. Naming the risk upfront reads as professionalism, not weakness.
- Every engagement has an agreed fallback contact plan. Before we start, the client and I agree on what happens if I go quiet: which alternate category of channel we will try, in what order, and how long to wait before assuming a disruption rather than a disappearance. The plan matters more than the specific tools.
- Work is structured to be batched. I design deliverables so that large stretches — analysis, documentation, architecture review, report writing — can be done entirely offline, with connectivity needed only at the edges for handoff. A consulting practice that needs the internet continuously is fragile. One that needs it briefly and periodically can survive almost anything.
- Everything lives locally too. Every document, every reference, every piece of client material I am authorized to hold — synchronized to my own machines whenever connectivity allows. When the network went away, my work did not.
Working inside the outage
Then the long middle. Weeks where the working day has no inbox.
The surprise is that some of that time was the most productive of my career. Deep work — the kind consultants always claim they lack time for — is what remains when the interruptions are physically impossible. I wrote playbooks. I built out methodology documents I still use today. I finished analysis that had been stalled behind a wall of meetings. My SOC years taught me to work from a queue: triage what is in front of you, process it thoroughly, document as you go. A blackout hands you exactly one queue and removes everything else.
The discipline is to treat delivery as decoupled from connectivity. The work gets finished and packaged as if it will ship in an hour. Then it waits. When a usable window arrives — and windows do arrive, unpredictably — everything staged goes out at once: the status update, the finished deliverables, the invoice, the next-steps note. Clients who expected a consultant lost for months instead received a bundle of completed work with a calm cover message. Several told me later that this single pattern is why they stayed.
The other half of survival is financial, and it is unglamorous: a cash buffer measured in months, because invoicing and payment collection degrade along with everything else. The freelancers around me who suffered most were not the least skilled. They were the ones running with no margin.
What daily life taught the work
I will keep the personal side at the altitude it deserves: a shutdown disrupts everything, not just business. Being cut off from colleagues, from family abroad, from the ordinary texture of a connected life — that is a weight, and pretending otherwise would be false. During my degree work in Estonia I interviewed people who depended on network access to reach their own families, and then I lived the other side of that research. It left me with a durable conviction: connectivity is not a luxury layered on top of life. For a distributed family, and for a distributed profession, it is load-bearing.
But weight is not the whole story. The practice survived. Every client relationship that entered the first long shutdown with a fallback plan came out the other side intact.
Looking forward
I do not romanticize any of this. Resilience under constraint is a skill I would happily have learned some easier way. But the playbook it produced — name the risk in the contract, agree on fallbacks before you need them, batch the work, keep everything local, hold a buffer, and never let silence be the message — has made me a better consultant in ordinary times too, because ordinary times contain smaller versions of the same failures.
If you build your practice assuming the network is a privilege rather than a constant, you will be calmer than your competitors on the bad days and no worse on the good ones. That is the whole secret. And it is a portable one: I now help clients build the same assumption into their organizations, which means the hardest months of my working life became, in the end, the most useful thing on my CV.