Apparatus and methods for maintaining service during a communication network outage. The apparatus may include an outage monitor. The outage monitor may monitor conditions that may affect the performance or integrity of a WAN. The apparatus may include a digital switch that may be configured to switch, responsive to a state variable in the monitor, between: a regular-operations information machine at an edge location; and a contingency server disposed at the edge location. When the switch engages the contingency server, data on the contingency server may be available to one or more of banking associates, call center attendants, customers and other suitable enterprise personnel and systems.