The Day Heavy Snowfall in Sapporo Brought the Office to a Halt

That morning, something already felt off on the subway during my commute. There were fewer passengers than usual, and the weather app on my phone showed a heavy snow warning across all of Sapporo. The snow visible through the window wasn't just a winter scene. It looked like a white wall. When I arrived at the office and was brushing the snow off my coat, the lobby lights flickered once. A few seconds later, the entire office was plunged into darkness.

UPS alarms started going off everywhere. When I opened the server room door and went in, the status indicator lights on the racks were going out one by one. I could feel my heart racing, but in my head I kept telling myself, "Everything's up in the cloud, so it'll be fine." Over the past year, our team had migrated nearly all of our business systems to a cloud computing infrastructure, and I was pretty proud of that work.

The problem wasn't the power outage itself. Power was restored in about four hours. The real problem was everything that happened during those four hours.

The illusion that being in the cloud means being safe

The first thing I checked when the outage hit was the internet connection. Naturally, it was down. The entire building had lost power, so the routers and switches weren't working either. My laptop battery was still alive, but without a network, there was no way to access cloud services.

I tried tethering with my phone. Maybe because of the heavy snow, the cell tower signal was unstable too, and the connection kept cutting in and out. In a brief moment when I managed to connect, I checked my email and found urgent enquiries from two clients. One was about a VPN connection failure, the other about being unable to access the file server. Both were routed through our office network, so with the gateway down, there was nothing we could do.

The senior colleague sitting next to me asked, "Where's the disaster recovery manual?" That manual was on the company wiki. The company wiki that was in the cloud. We looked at each other for a moment, then silently turned away. That brief silence said everything.

What I learned in four hours

With almost nothing I could do, I opened the notepad on my laptop and started listing out what the problems were, one by one. I figured I should at least document things while I still had battery left.

As I wrote, a pattern emerged. When we migrated to the cloud, we had left almost nothing stored locally. The disaster recovery documents, the client contact list, the network diagrams, even the emergency contact information. All of it existed only in online tools. We had put everything up there on the assumption that the cloud would always be accessible.

Anyone who has spent a winter in Sapporo knows: heavy snow doesn't come without warning. The weather forecast tells you days in advance. And yet I had brushed it off, thinking, "This much snow is normal." Heavy snowfall is part of everyday life during Sapporo winters, and most days pass without any issues. But "most" is not "all."

Around the three-hour mark, the building management office restored partial power using the emergency generator. The elevators and hallway lights came on, but the office outlets still had no power. I plugged my laptop into an outlet on the hallway wall, sat down on the floor, and kept taking notes. Next to me, someone from another floor was sitting on the floor the same way, charging their phone. "It's really coming down out there," they said, and I smiled and replied, "Yeah, it really is." That was the most peaceful moment in those four hours.

What I changed after recovery

After power was fully restored, as I brought the systems back up one by one, what I felt most was that the emotional toll was greater than the technical problems. The anxiety of "What if something like this happens again?" lingered for a while.

So starting the very next week, I put several changes into action.

I saved the disaster recovery manual as a PDF and printed it out for the server room cabinet. I never imagined a single sheet of paper could be so reassuring. I printed out the client emergency contacts the same way. Printing things on paper in the digital age might seem laughable, but when the network is completely down, paper is the only medium you can actually reach.

I created a routine to back up critical configuration files and network topology information to an encrypted USB drive once a week. I wrote an automation script and set it to run every Friday before leaving work. The script itself is simple. What matters is making it a habit.

I also re-examined the UPS capacity. The existing UPS had been sized to cover only the server equipment, so I proposed to my boss that we also connect the router and main switch to the UPS. It required additional equipment costing roughly 50,000 yen, and getting approval turned out to be surprisingly easy. Probably because the memory of that day was still fresh for everyone.

The most fundamental change, though, was learning to trust the cloud without blindly relying on it. Cloud infrastructure itself is excellent. In terms of server availability, scalability, and ease of management, it operates at a level that a small office like ours could never achieve on its own. But if the path to the cloud (the physical route from our office to the internet) is severed, then even the best cloud might as well not exist.

After the snow melted

Honestly, since that blizzard, I haven't experienced a power outage of similar scale. I haven't had a chance to verify whether the backup routine I created actually works in a real situation, and part of me hopes I never do.

But every Friday when I run the USB backup, and every time the printed manual in the server room cabinet catches my eye, I'm reminded of that moment sitting on the hallway floor taking notes. The helplessness I felt then is what built the habits I have now.

This isn't a technically impressive story. Copying configuration files to a USB drive, printing things on paper, expanding the UPS coverage. Anyone could do these things. But until you've actually been through it once, it's hard to truly feel why any of this is necessary. I was the same way.

Next winter, Sapporo will get plenty of snow again. That much is certain. What's uncertain is when it will come and how severe it will be. At the very least, I've made sure that when the next outage hits, I can respond from my desk, not from a hallway floor.