I want to tell you what the last three weeks of my life looked like, because I think it matters for anyone who works in IT or is thinking about working in IT, and because I don’t think the rest of the world has any idea what just happened behind the scenes.

On March 11th, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. By March 13th, my phone hadn’t stopped ringing. By March 16th, we were in full emergency mode, building infrastructure that should have taken six months in what turned out to be about ten days. And we were far from alone. Across the country, IT departments of every size went through some version of the same experience: the sudden, disorienting realization that the entire company needed to work from home starting now, and that the only people who could make that happen were us.

The Scale of What Just Happened

The numbers are almost hard to believe. In mid-March, roughly 31% of American workers were doing some portion of their work remotely. By the first week of April, that number had nearly doubled to over 60%. Zoom went from 10 million daily meeting participants in December to 200 million by the end of March, which is a 1,900% increase in three months. Microsoft Teams went from a product most employees had heard of but never opened to 44 million daily active users by late March, adding 12 million new daily users in a single week. These aren’t gradual adoption curves. This is an entire economy changing how it operates in less than a month.

Behind every one of those numbers is an IT team that made it possible. Someone had to provision the laptops. Someone had to scale the VPN from supporting a few hundred remote salespeople to handling the entire workforce simultaneously. Someone had to stand up Zoom or Teams across departments that had never used video conferencing before, write the quick-start guides, field the five hundred helpdesk tickets about audio not working, and do all of it while figuring out their own home office setup at the same time.

What the Work Actually Looked Like

I’ve been in IT for a long time, and I can tell you that nothing in my career prepared me for the compression of timelines we just experienced. One government agency reported scaling from fewer than 3,000 concurrent VPN users to 29,000 virtually overnight. Microsoft itself had to scale its VPN infrastructure to support 128,000 concurrent remote connections for its own 50,000-plus employees. Our situation was similar in spirit if not in scale, and the challenge wasn’t just technical. It was logistical, political, and deeply human.

We had people who had never worked from home before, and I don’t mean they preferred the office. I mean they had never, not once, connected to the corporate network from outside the building. They didn’t have laptops. Some of them didn’t have reliable home internet. The helpdesk, which was itself suddenly remote, was fielding calls from people trying to figure out how to join a video meeting while their kids were doing remote school on the same connection and the family’s bandwidth was buckling under the load.

Meanwhile, on the infrastructure side, the tools we were deploying were scaling in ways their own developers hadn’t anticipated. Zoom’s daily participant count went from 10 million to 200 million in roughly the time it takes to run a quarterly planning cycle, and Microsoft Teams added 12 million new daily users in a single week at the end of March. These platforms held up remarkably well, all things considered, but the IT teams responsible for deploying and managing them were essentially building the airplane while flying it. Configuration decisions that would normally go through weeks of testing and review were being made in hours, and we all knew that some of those decisions would come back to haunt us.

And then there was security, which added an entirely separate layer of complexity to an already impossible timeline. Fifty-three percent of employees reported receiving no security guidelines from their employer about working remotely, which tells you how much ground security teams had to cover while simultaneously helping stand up the infrastructure itself. The FBI issued a warning about “Zoom bombing” by mid-March because meetings were being set up without passwords or waiting rooms, and uninvited people were showing up with everything from offensive images to actual threats. Shadow IT became a growing concern as employees who couldn’t get what they needed through official channels signed up for whatever cloud service solved their immediate problem, creating access points that security teams then had to identify, assess, and bring under management. Keeping the company connected and keeping it secure weren’t competing priorities; they were the same priority, and IT teams were doing both at once.

The Invisible Weekend

Here’s the part that I think deserves more attention than it’s getting. During those critical two weeks in mid-March, IT teams across the country worked hours that would make a first-year investment banker blink. I’m talking about sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, for people who were simultaneously dealing with their own pandemic anxiety, their own kids being home from school, their own spouses trying to work from the kitchen table. Internet service providers saw a 65% spike in outages across North America compared to January, which meant that even the infrastructure under our infrastructure was failing. ISP networks logged roughly 4,500 outages between January and July of 2020, compared to about 400 for cloud providers, because residential internet was never designed for every household to be running business-critical applications all day.

And through all of it, the recognition was essentially nonexistent. Healthcare workers, rightly, were being called heroes. Grocery store employees, rightly, were getting hazard pay and public gratitude. But the people who made it possible for millions of knowledge workers to keep doing their jobs from home, who kept the VPNs running and the video calls connected and the data secure, those people were mostly invisible. If the VPN went down, the entire company stopped. If the VPN stayed up, nobody thought about it at all. That’s always been the deal in IT, but the stakes had never been this high.

What This Means for IT Careers

I’ve written before about the massive skills shortage in IT and what that means for people looking to break into the field. What just happened in March is going to accelerate that shortage dramatically. Every company that scrambled to go remote is now acutely, painfully aware of how dependent it is on its IT infrastructure, and most of them are also aware that their infrastructure wasn’t ready. That means hiring. That means investment. That means the IT professionals who can build, scale, and secure remote work environments are going to be in extraordinary demand for years to come.

Cloud security, which was already the number one most sought-after skill area before the pandemic, just became even more critical. The same goes for network engineering, systems administration, and anyone who can build a helpdesk operation that scales gracefully under pressure. But it also means demand for the less obvious IT skills: the people who can write clear documentation, who can train non-technical users, who can design processes that work when everyone is distributed and nobody can walk down the hall to ask a question.

If you’re already in IT, the next few months are going to be an opportunity to demonstrate your value in ways that were never available before. Document what you built. Write down the decisions you made and why you made them. Keep track of the metrics: how many users you onboarded, how fast you scaled, what broke and how you fixed it. That documentation is going to matter when performance review season comes around, and it’s going to matter even more if you decide to look for a new role, because every company in the country is about to want people who have done exactly what you just did.

If you’re thinking about getting into IT, what just happened should tell you everything you need to know about whether this field matters. We just moved the entire economy home, and IT is the reason it worked. I wrote back in December about how burnout was already a crisis in our profession, and everything that’s happened since has intensified that conversation. But alongside the exhaustion, there’s also a sense of purpose that’s hard to find in many fields. The work matters, it mattered before the pandemic, and it’s going to matter even more in whatever comes next.

Looking Forward

We’re still in the middle of this. The emergency phase is winding down for most organizations, but the work of hardening what we built under pressure, optimizing it for the long term, and supporting a workforce that may never fully return to the office is just beginning. I’ll be writing more about what the remote work shift means for IT careers, for security, and for the profession as a whole in the coming months.

For now, if you work in IT, take a breath. What you just did was remarkable, even if nobody outside your department knows it yet. And if you’re reading this as someone who just spent the last three weeks working from home without a hitch, consider that there’s a team of people who made that possible, and they’re probably still working right now.