Disruption Doesn’t Ask for Notice: What April’s Tube Strikes May Reveal About Your Infrastructure
If you’re based in or around London, you’ll have no doubt seen Tube strikes scheduled for this week (and again throughout the year, at least at the time of writing).
Now, what that means for the average person is journeys are disrupted, commutes stretched, and plans are at risk of being changed at short notice - pending the strikes being called off (as they so often are).
Yet, regardless of whether they go ahead or not, for many businesses, it forces their workforce to be ready for a full, unplanned shift to remote or hybrid working for most of the week, with minimal prep time.
People have no choice but to stay home to access systems, communicate, and get work done. For some, it may seem frustrating, but it can actually be incredibly useful because it shows you how your infrastructure behaves under pressure.
The Difference Between Planned and Real Hybrid Working
Most organisations will say they support hybrid working. And on paper, that’s usually true. People can log in remotely from anywhere; their files should all be accessible, and, like it or loathe it, things like Teams or Zoom mean meetings can happen online.
But there’s a difference between a planned hybrid and a forced hybrid approach.
Planned hybrid is controlled - and what most businesses work to these days:
Staggered office days, usually with a 3:2 split between office
Predictable usage
Gradual load on systems
Forced hybrid looks more like this week, where:
Everyone is logging in remotely at the same time
Increased reliance on VPN or cloud access
Heavier demand for collaboration tools
Support teams potentially dealing with spikes in issues
And the forced approach is when small cracks tend to show.
What Disruption Actually Tests
When something like a transport strike hits, it quietly stress-tests a few key areas and shows that some setups are - perhaps - not as ready as they think.
1. Remote access under load: VPNs and remote access solutions often work fine… Until everyone needs them at once. When they do, you may start to experience slower connections - if not dropouts, or bottlenecks. If performance dips noticeably when everyone’s remote, it’s usually a sign the setup wasn’t designed for full-scale remote usage.
2. Identity and access control: When people can’t just “pop into the office”, access becomes more important.
Are users able to get to what they need without workarounds?
Or are people sharing access, bypassing controls, or finding their own solutions?
Can you even verify that the person asking isn’t a malicious outsider who’s got through your defences, waiting for a moment like this?
All of that’s where risk starts creeping in.
3. Collaboration tools and sprawl: When everyone goes remote, communication tools get a proper workout.
Teams, Slack, Zoom, email, WhatsApp… You name it.
If things feel fragmented or chaotic, it’s usually because the structure behind those tools isn’t clearly defined.
4. Device readiness: Not everyone works from the same setup at home. There’s a whole host of different networks, with different devices and different levels of patching and security that suddenly become part of your organisation’s network.
So, if endpoints aren’t properly managed, that variability becomes visible very quickly.
5. Support response: When issues spike, support teams feel it first, and ticket volume increases. The knock-on effect is that response times stretch to accommodate, and small issues become bigger frustrations.
That’s not a people problem. It’s usually a sign of complexity or lack of standardisation in the environment.
The Useful Question to Ask
Moments like this enforced disruption aren’t about whether everything worked perfectly, they’re about asking:
What struggled?
Where did people get stuck?
What slowed things down?
What had to be worked around?
Those answers tell you more about your environment than any planned test ever will.
A Few Practical Checks
If this week caused even minor disruption, it’s worth doing a sense-check on a few things.
Could your remote access handle a full workforce, not just part of it?
Are you still relying heavily on VPNs as the default?
Do users have consistent, secure access from any location?
Are collaboration tools structured, or just accumulated over time?
Do you have clear visibility over devices and activity outside the office?
None of these poses new questions, yet disruption has a way of making them more obvious.
Why This Matters Beyond Tube Strikes
Naturally, this isn’t really about transport and the London Underground network - and as alluded to earlier, there’s also every chance these strikes may not even go ahead.
The lesson, instead, is about resilience - and that’s because disruption rarely arrives with notice.
It might be:
A transport issue
Severe weather
A local outage
An issue with your office, meaning you can’t get into the building
A broader incident affecting access or systems
Sure, the trigger changes, but the effect is the same. And when something out of the blue crops up, people need to work from somewhere else, quickly.
But does your infrastructure support the potential for disruption, or does it just expose gaps?
Where We See This Most Often
In practice, the environments that struggle tend to have a few common traits:
Over-reliance on legacy remote access models
Too many disconnected tools
Inconsistent device management
Limited visibility outside the office network
None of these are unusual, and they’re often the result of systems evolving over time without being revisited.
If that sounds like an all-too-familiar tale, it may be time to take a look at your setup.
Final Thought
Tube strikes will pass, and things will settle back into routine.
People will return to offices, commutes will normalise, and the disruption will fade (if it even begins).
But the insights gained from moments like this shouldn’t be ignored, because they offer a rare, unfiltered view of how your business operates when conditions aren’t ideal.
And in 2026, that’s the version of your infrastructure that matters most. Not how it works on a normal day, but rather, how it holds up when it isn’t one.