Like many companies near seismic faults in Silicon Valley, eBay has emergency plans in case an earthquake destroys critical Internet connections. The costly disruption or slowdown of service because of financially strapped telecommunication providers is the latest major concern for companies.

"We talk about natural or financial disasters and don't necessarily distinguish between the two," eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said. "If the service ain't there, it ain't there. That's the bottom line. It doesn't matter why or how it happened. We just need contingency plans to take care of customers." To prepare for the deluge, eBay beefed up its co-location facilities, spread out important applications such as e- mail on different servers, and found backup providers for Web hosting and other critical jobs.

It isn't the only company to equate telecommunication providers' crises with unpredictable acts of nature. Companies around the world are developing co-location facilities, interviewing backup vendors, bolstering wireless capabilities, and adding emergency clauses to business contracts in wake of the accounting troubles gripping WorldCom.

WorldCom is $32 billion in debt and hovering near bankruptcy after announcing it had improperly booked $3.8 billion of operating expenses over the past five quarters. Experts doubt that WorldCom, the No. 2 U.S. long-distance carrier, would shut down its network with a flip of a switch, they are warning customers to prepare backup plans.

Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week that the industry was in a state of "utter crisis" and that he was bracing for more bad news. Talk of a broader meltdown has prompted a sense of imminent disaster at companies that rely on Internet, phone or wireless connections for revenue and employee productivity. The prospect of a telecommunications collapse now ranks as the most likely disaster to assail Corporate America, and executives have adopted a diverisification mentality. Small providers are in trouble, but how much better off are the Sprints, Qwests and AT&Ts? It's not a matter of switching from one to the other; it's a matter of protecting yourself from everyone. It is difficult to predict anything anymore.

Janis L. Gogan, assistant professor of computer information systems at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., said companies must extend existing contingency plans to incorporate potential telecommunications troubles. Gogan, who also teaches e-commerce strategy at Harvard University, said most Internet-dependent companies bolstered emergency planning to prepare for the Y2K bug and again after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She said it would be unrealistic for e-commerce companies--particularly cash-strapped dot-coms--to have 100 percent redundancy to avoid any loss of service in case of an outage. She recommended that companies assess how much money would be lost during an outage--then determine how much they can afford to leave to chance.