If you are reading this mid-crisis: contact us now and skip to the “first steps” section below while you wait for the call back. If you are reading this on a calm day, even better; the difference between a bad morning and a lost week is mostly decided before the emergency starts.
Emergency IT support is what it sounds like: urgent response when systems your business depends on stop working. This page covers the emergencies we actually see, what to do in the first minutes (and what makes things worse), how response works when you call an MSP versus a stranger from a search result, and how to be the kind of business whose emergencies are short.
The emergencies we actually see
Five scenarios cover most of the panicked calls:
- Server or storage failure. The shared drive vanishes, the application everyone uses stops, the server will not boot. Work halts building-wide.
- Ransomware and cyber incidents. Files encrypted, strange lock screens, a mailbox sending emails nobody wrote. The clock matters more here than in any other scenario, and so does not making it worse.
- Email outage. Nobody can send or receive; for most businesses this is commercial silence.
- Network or internet failure. Cloud-dependent businesses discover exactly how cloud-dependent they are; tills, phones and order systems follow the connection down.
- The departed-IT-person emergency. Less dramatic, just as urgent: the one person who knew the passwords has gone, something has broken, and nobody can even log in to look.
What to do in the first 30 minutes
Whatever the scenario, three rules:
1. Stop the spread before you start the fix. For anything that smells of ransomware or compromise: disconnect affected machines from the network (unplug the cable, kill the WiFi) but do not switch them off; powered-off machines lose evidence and, in some ransomware cases, recovery options. For hardware failures: stop staff from retrying and rebooting endlessly; repeated restarts can convert a recoverable fault into a permanent one.
2. Write down what happened. Two minutes of notes (what stopped working, when, what changed recently, exact error messages, who noticed first) shortens every subsequent conversation with whoever fixes it.
3. Call, don’t tinker. The gap between a two-hour incident and a two-day one is usually somebody plausible-sounding trying fixes for an afternoon first. Our server-down first response guide covers the triage sequence in detail, and for cyber incidents the incident response plan adds the notification duties: insurer early, and the ICO clock (72 hours) where personal data is involved.
How emergency response actually works
When an existing client calls us with a P1 (business-down) issue, the sequence is: immediate remote triage (most emergencies are diagnosed within minutes of getting eyes on), containment, then either remote resolution (the majority) or an engineer dispatched. From our Dundee Technology Park base, same-day onsite covers Dundee, Perth, Fife, Angus and St Andrews directly, with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness reached same-day for genuine emergencies where remote hands cannot do the job.
Two honest notes about the economics. First, for businesses with no existing IT arrangement, emergency callouts are billed at incident rates (the UK norm runs £80 to £150 per hour or per incident), and you inherit whatever documentation state your systems are in, which is usually the real cost: an unknown environment takes hours to understand before it takes minutes to fix. Second, this is why managed clients’ emergencies are shorter: we already hold the credentials, the documentation and the monitoring history, and the response time is a contracted SLA rather than a best effort. Our contracts and SLAs guide explains what those commitments look like in writing.
We do take emergency calls from businesses that are not clients, capacity permitting, and a proportion of our long-term clients arrived exactly that way: mid-disaster, followed by a conversation about never doing this again.
Preventing the sequel
Every emergency has an after-action truth: it was either bad luck or a missing basic, and it is usually the second. The pattern behind most of them:
- Server failures land hardest where hardware aged past its refresh window with no tested recovery arrangement behind it.
- Ransomware lands where patching lagged and MFA had gaps, and becomes a catastrophe only where backups were connected, untested or absent.
- The departed-IT-person emergency is entirely a documentation and ownership failure, months in the making.
The boring machinery of managed support (monitoring, patching, tested backups, documentation) exists precisely to make emergencies rare and short. If this page found you mid-crisis, deal with today first; then let the free IT health check show you which basics were missing, because the sequel is optional.
Frequently asked questions
How quickly can you respond to an IT emergency?
Remote triage starts within minutes to an hour depending on arrangement; for managed clients, P1 response times are contracted. Onsite is same-day across our Scottish coverage area for genuine business-down emergencies.
What should we do while waiting for help?
Isolate anything suspicious from the network without powering it off, stop repeated reboot attempts, note what happened and when, and gather admin credentials and recent-change information if you have them. Then resist the urge to experiment.
Should we pay a ransomware ransom?
Take advice before deciding anything: from responders, your insurer (whose policy may have requirements) and, where relevant, law enforcement. Payment guarantees nothing and funds the next attack; tested offline backups are what remove the dilemma entirely.
Do you help businesses that aren’t your clients?
Capacity permitting, yes, at incident rates, and we will be honest about what an unknown environment does to the timeline. Bring whatever documentation and credentials exist; it shortens everything.
What does emergency IT support cost?
Ad-hoc emergency work typically runs £80 to £150 per hour in the UK, plus the time an undocumented environment adds. Managed clients pay nothing extra for business-hours emergencies; that is what the monthly fee already bought.
How do we stop this happening again?
An audit of what failed and why, then the missing basics: monitoring, patching, tested backups, documentation, ownership of accounts. That is the conversation after every emergency we attend, and the free IT health check is where it starts.
The number to have before you need it
The worst time to choose an IT provider is during the outage. If today is calm, spend an hour on the free IT health check and find the weak points while they are cheap to fix. If today is not calm: get in touch now, tell us what stopped and when, and we will take it from there.
