I'm currently a 1-2 year network engineer at a small telecom company. I'm deciding whether I'd like to continue pursuing networking and go for my CCNP or diversify into Security/Pentest because it seems more interesting to me. Any thoughts or advise would greatly be appreciated.

Picture a branch where 80 people suddenly can't access the order system. Both wan circuits show up and the ipsec tunnel is established, but the application still times out. The operations manager asks whether customers should be warned about delayed orders.

The engineer's updates in the image are useful to the troubleshooting team. They don't tell operations what to do with orders waiting right now. An established tunnel also doesn't prove application traffic can make the round trip, so a restoration estimate would be a guess.

I'd send something like: "The branch still can't process orders. We haven't confirmed the cause or a restoration time. If this will affect customers, please consider the manual order process. I'll update you in 15 minutes, even if we're still investigating."

Meanwhile, the technical team can check the return path, firewall policy, nat and packet captures. The manager gets the impact, the uncertainty and a time for the next update.

How does your team handle updates when the outage is real but the cause is still unclear?